Partials series 1-3

“In a way that maintains order,” said Hobb.

Kessler huffed. “You don’t need to spell everything out for her.”

“Then what about my work?” asked Kira. “What about everything I’m doing to find a cure—how does that fit in?” She frowned. “Is it even a priority?”

“Plans within plans,” said Hobb. “If you can find something, we’ll jump on it, but if you can’t . . . we have to be ready.”

“Just remember,” said Delarosa. “Absolutely no one can know of this. We brought you into our confidence first because you forced our hand, and again because you’ve proven yourself intelligent and capable. But you must have known this the moment you set foot back on this island: If anyone finds out about what we’re doing, we won’t just have a riot. We’ll have a revolution.”

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Kira went to the cafeteria instead of going straight up to the lab. She needed time to think.

What was the Senate planning? Part of her knew they were right, but there was still a voice in the back of her head telling her she needed to be alert. They saw the same problems she did, but their solutions were so different: Kira wanted to cure RM, but they seemed to take it as a means of maintaining control. And yes, they had very good reasons for maintaining control—the society in East Meadow was anything but solid, and the societies beyond, in the outlands, were even worse. They needed strong leadership, a strong hand to guide them.

And yet.

She closed her eyes, breathing deeply and switching gears. No more Senate—I need to get back to work.

Kira walked quickly through the halls, ignoring the bustle around her. She nodded to Shaylon, standing watch by the door, and went inside the lab. The blower hissed, the decontamination circuits buzzed in the floor, and there he was, still strapped to the table, arms extended, face to the sky, eyes dark and solemn. He glanced at her as she came in, then turned back to the ceiling.

She tapped the medicomp screen to wake it up and found the breath analysis still open; the scanner had finished its task, cataloguing thousands of different particles. Many of them it recognized, both organic and inorganic: the unusual gasses present in exhalation, fragments of shed skin cells, microscopic flecks of dirt, trace amounts of minerals, and a handful of common bacteria. Nothing special. The list of particles it didn’t recognize, on the other hand, was a dozen times longer. She expanded it, scrolling through with a tap of her finger: image after image of bizarre little chemical compounds, some big, some small, all oddly shaped and incredibly strange. She’d never seen anything like them before. As she flipped through them, she noticed that many of the images were similar, and the compounds seemed to break down into several major categories, repeated over and over. She started marking the images, studying the molecules and flagging what looked like key identifiers, separating them into subgroups, teaching the medicomp how to recognize the different pieces. Soon it was flying through the list on its own, dividing the compounds into nine major types with a tenth group of unconnected outliers. It still offered no hint as to their function, and Kira couldn’t discern one by looking at them. Whatever they were, Samm’s body was full of them.

None of the compounds were remotely as complex as the Lurker, but they still didn’t match with any substance Kira was familiar with—not fabric, not food, obviously not mineral or plastic. She looked over at him, then back at the screen, then pursed her lips and stood up. They were too common and consistent to be accidental, so they obviously had a purpose, and his body would need creation or receptor sites to take advantage of that purpose. Perhaps this had something to do with their resistance? There was only one way to find out. She walked to the table, unlocked the wheels, and started pushing it across the room. She expected Samm to ask what she was doing, but he stayed perfectly quiet.

She pulled him to a stop at the DORD scanner, a heavy machine nearly as big as some of the cars out rusting in the parking lot. This was the big gun in her laboratory arsenal: a medical scanner that could catalog an entire body, layer by layer and piece by piece. She hit a switch to turn it on, then crossed back to the medicomp while it booted up. The definitions she’d created for the categories of compounds were still there, along with several of the clearest images, and she froze them to the screen before sliding the screen out, disconnecting it from the medicomp, and carrying it carefully to the DORD. The screen had an impressive amount of computing power all on its own, but it was nothing compared to the sensor systems it could attach to. She slid it into the DORD, hearing the click as it locked into place, and a few quick finger taps later the machine was ready to go. The DORD would scan Samm’s lungs, throat, and nasal passages for anything resembling the mysterious compounds, which would give her a good idea of where they came from and where they went. She’d have to intuit the rest from there. Kira raised the sensor array, swung it out, and centered Samm beneath it; it was a thick, heavy piece of equipment in a white plastic shell, easily the heaviest thing in the room, but it held its own weight perfectly. She tapped start, and the DORD whirred to life.

Kira watched the screen closely, eager to see what the scan turned up. It was not a quick scan. She drummed her fingers nervously on the DORD housing, then turned and walked to the window; she wanted to ask Samm if he knew what the particles were, despite his refusal to talk, but now that the scan had started, any significant motion would upset it. She turned again and watched him, steady as a rock, almost as if he were holding still on purpose.

She saw motion on the screen and ran to check it; the DORD was already displaying and categorizing some preliminary images. She flipped through the list and opened one for the compound labeled M, a funny little horseshoe-shaped particle. The DORD had found several structures in Samm’s body that it thought might be related to it: one in the nasal cavity and the rest in the lungs. Kira pulled them up, side by side on the screen, and studied them; they looked almost like glands, though not any glands Kira was familiar with. The one in his sinuses was significantly larger, and the DORD had cross-linked it to several other files. Kira opened the list and flipped through it quickly, mildly surprised at what she saw; the DORD had linked that image to every compound it had scanned for thus far. They each had a little gland of their own in the lungs, but they were all connected to the big one in his head.

Kira studied the gland closer while the DORD kept working. What did it do? She couldn’t just ask the computer to guess, but she could ask it to search its database for partial matches. She started the search and looked back at the image again, buckling down for another long wait, but the results were almost instantaneous: no match. She frowned and ran the test again. No match.

Guess I’m going to have to do this manually. Given that each particle had two related structures, the obvious first guess was that one structure created the particle and the other one caught it: a writer and a reader. Which implied that they carried information. She ran another search, this time looking for anything in the database that wasn’t human. The DORD found an old file, pre-Break, where somebody had scanned a dog, and she asked the computer to look for partial matches in there. One popped up almost immediately, displaying a structure remarkably similar, though far simpler, than the one in Samm. It was a vomeronasal organ.

Samm had an incredibly sophisticated pheromonal system.

Kira pulled up more files, reading what she could on pheromones: They were a system of simple chemical communication, like a form of smell but far, far more specialized. Insects used them for simple things like marking trails or warning one another of danger; dogs used them to claim territory and to signal breeding times. What did the Partials use them for?

I may as well try asking, she thought. “Tell me about your . . . pheromones.” Predictably, Samm said nothing. “You have a highly developed system of chemical synthesizers and receptors; can you tell me about it?”

No response.

“Can’t blame me for trying.” She thought a moment, looking around the room, then opened the medicomp and pulled out the rubber glove Samm had breathed into. She brought it near his face, pricked it with a pin, and squeezed it as hard as she could, propelling the air directly into Samm’s nose. He coughed and spluttered, jerking his head to get out of the stream of air, but Kira watched in wonder as his demeanor seemed to grow more calm—his heart rate rose as he reacted to the forced air, then fell again almost immediately as he reacted to . . . something else. The pheromones. His eyes relaxed, his expression softened, his breathing became more even.

He seemed, Kira thought suddenly, like he was making exactly the same face he’d made in the morning, when he’d agreed to blow into the glove.

“Kuso,” he said. “That’s not fair.”

Kira put her hands on her hips. “What just happened?”

“You’re using my own data against me, and now I—damn it.” He closed his mouth and looked at the ceiling.

“What data?” asked Kira. “The pheromones? Is that what you call them?” She looked at the glove in her hand, now deflated and floppy. “You just told me something you didn’t want to tell me, didn’t you? You’ve never done that—this was a slip. What did the pheromones do?”

Samm said nothing, and Kira brought the glove closer to her face, examining it closely. She walked to the center of the room, envisioning the way it had been laid out that morning—the DORD over here, the table over there, and Samm on top of it. She’d asked him to breathe into the glove and they’d shared something, a moment of . . . of something. Of actual communication. She’d made a joke about his name, he’d made one back, and then he’d agreed to help her collect a breath sample. He’d trusted her.

And then just now, after she blew it back in his face and asked him a question, he’d trusted her again—not for long, but long enough for his shield of hostile self-control to falter. He’d answered her question.

The pheromones had re-created the trust he’d felt that morning and forced him to feel it again.

“It’s like a chemical empathy system,” she said softly, walking back toward Samm. “Whatever you’re feeling, you broadcast with these pheromones, so that other Partials can feel it too. Or, at least know that you’re feeling it.” She sat in the chair next to him. “It’s like the social yawn: You can standardize one person’s emotional state across an entire group.”

“You can’t use it against me anymore,” said Samm. “I’m not breathing into your gloves.”

“I’m not trying to use it against you, I’m trying to understand it. What does it feel like?”

Samm turned to look at her. “What does hearing feel like?”

“Okay,” said Kira, nodding, “that was a stupid question, you’re right. It’s doesn’t feel like anything, it’s just part of who you are.”

“I’d forgotten that humans couldn’t link,” said Samm. “All this time I’ve been so confused, trying to figure out why you were all so melodramatic about everything. It’s because you can’t pick up each other’s emotions from the link, so you have to broadcast them through voice inflection and body language. It’s helpful, I’ll admit, but it’s kind of . . . histrionic.”

“Histrionic?” Kira asked. It was the single longest speech she’d ever heard him give. Was he talking openly, or was this more of his calculated planning? What did he have to gain by talking? She kept going, trying to draw out the conversation and see if he’d keep talking. “If you depend on chemical triggers to tell people how you’re feeling,” she said, “that explains a lot about you, too. You don’t display nearly enough emotion for human society; if we seem melodramatic to you, you seem downright deadpan to us.”

“It’s not just emotions,” he said, and Kira leaned forward, terrified that he would stop at any second, his openness popping like a bubble. “It lets us know if someone’s in trouble, or hurt, or excited. It helps us function as a unit, all working together. The link was intended for battlefield use, obviously; if someone’s on watch and sees something, a human would have to shout a warning, and then the other humans would have to wake up and figure out what the watchman was saying, and then they’d have to get ready for combat. If a Partial watchman sees something, the data goes out through the link and the other soldiers know it immediately; their adrenaline spikes, their heart rates speed up, their fight-or-flight reflex kicks in, and suddenly the entire squad is ready for battle, sometimes without even a word.”

“The data,” said Kira. “Links and data—very technological words.”

“You called me a biological robot yesterday,” said Samm. “That’s not entirely inaccurate.” He smiled, the first time she’d ever really seen him do that, and she did the same. “I don’t know how you people even function. It’s no wonder you lost the war.”

The words hung in the air like a poison cloud, killing any hope that the conversation might grow friendly. Kira turned back to the screen, trying not to yell at him. His attitude had changed as well; he was more solemn, somehow. Pensive.

“I worked in a mine,” he said softly. “You created us to win the Isolation War, and we did, and then we came home and the US government gave us jobs, and mine was in a mine. I wasn’t a slave, everything was legal and proper and ‘humane.’” He said the word as if it tasted bitter. “But I didn’t like it. I tried to get a different job, but no one would hire a Partial. I tried to get an education, to qualify for something nicer, but no schools would accept my application. We couldn’t move out of our government-assigned slum because our wages were barely livable, and nobody would sell to us anyway. Who wants to live next door to the artificial people?”

“So you rebelled.”

“We hated you,” he said. “I hated you.” He turned his head to catch her eye. “But I didn’t want genocide. None of us did.”

“Somebody did,” said Kira. Her voice was thick with held-back tears.

“And you lost every connection to the past,” said Samm. “I know exactly how you feel.”

“No, you don’t,” Kira hissed. “You say whatever you want, but don’t you dare say that. We lost our world, we lost our future, we lost our families—”

“Your parents were taken from you,” said Samm simply. “We killed ours when we killed you. Whatever pain you feel, you don’t have that guilt stacked on top of it.”

Kira bit her lip, trying to make sense of her own feelings. Samm was the enemy, and yet she felt sorry for him; his words had made her so mad, yet she felt almost guilty for feeling that way. She swallowed, forcing out a response that was part accusation, part desperate plea for understanding. “Is that why you’re telling me all this? Because you feel bad about killing us?”