THE CLIMB BACK out of the tunnel is as uneventful as the way in and just as nerve-racking. Every one of my steps is dogged by a seething, oily mess of unfocused anger. Mack pings me and I send a terse confirmation that the deed is done before cutting off all comms. I trap my finger in a carabiner before I winch myself up to the partially healed cut in the roof of the tunnel, and when I reopen it the anger spikes into a sharp point of the purest rage at myself. The self-loathing builds as I climb until, at the top of the city, I have to stop and press my temples with my fingertips. I want them to penetrate my skull until they pierce my brain and just end this.
I can’t stop thinking about the seed, but not the one I’ve just planted—the first one, the one I saw in Suh’s lab on Atlas. We were due to have dinner, but she hadn’t turned up. We were ten days out from our destination and she’d been less reliable the closer we got. When I found her in the lab, she was crying.
“They’re happy tears,” she said as I rushed over. She laughed as we embraced and I tried to reframe the sobs I’d heard on the way in as nothing to worry about. “I worked it out, that’s all,” she said, wiping her cheeks, only for new tears to fall.
“Worked what out?”
“How it happened. Why I changed.” She pointed at the plant behind the plasglass in front of her. I knew the shape of its leaves and its thick, hairy stem far too well. She’d grown hundreds of them since we left Earth. But this one had a fat seed pod growing out of the top.
“Is that what you saw that day at the nature reserve?”
She nodded and I went closer, noting the sealed container now and the pipe running off it into an analyzer. The seed pod was round and veined, like an uglier version of a poppy ready to scatter its seeds everywhere. I had thought about it so many times over the years since her coma—it was what had caused it after all—and finally seeing it was strangely anticlimactic. How could so much have been started by such a small thing?
“It’s not the first one I’ve managed to grow,” she confessed. “I didn’t want to show anyone else. Not until I was sure. Now that I am, I still don’t want this to go on the network.”
That was contrary to everything else she researched. “Why?”
“Because it could be abused. I don’t think my reaction to it was unique. I think I was more susceptible than most, but it could work on someone else.”
She was skipping ahead, having forgotten how little I knew about this line of inquiry. I’d given her guidance on various aspects of the genetics—it was trying to solve the puzzle of her coma and subsequent change that inspired me to study a new discipline on Atlas—but she’d been joining the dots alone. I couldn’t see how it all fit together.
“Have you isolated a poison?”
“It’s more elegant than that. Look at this.”
Moments later a share invite arrived and I opened the link. It was raw footage from her lab notes. The seed behind the sealed plasglass, then her face coming into view until her nose touched the glass. Just as I was about to ask if I should speed it up, the footage slowed and zoomed in to the seed pod. A puff of what looked like pollen sprayed the screen between her face and the plant.
“It’s not pollen,” she said before I could ask. “It’s closer to a pheromone, but not like anything else I’ve studied. It’s not to attract insects—it’s not for attraction at all, in fact. It’s only released when a person gets close enough to it to trigger the mechanism.”
“Only an animal? Not an insect?”
“No, you misunderstand me—it’s designed to be breathed in by a human.”
I folded my arms. “How could you know that? We don’t have any animals on board, so how could you test the theory?”
“Ren, that footage was taken two years ago. I’ve been working on it ever since. Like I said, I didn’t tell anyone.”
She must have seen the hurt on my face. “But we talk about everything.”
“I had to keep this just for me. While I was working it out.” I knew there was more to it than that. Whatever happened to her that day brought us together in many ways, but also separated us. And not just us: it separated her from the rest of humanity.
She beckoned me over to one of the chairs set up in front of a projector and taught me everything she’d learned. Slowly, I fit the pieces into my own narrative.
It started the day we went hiking in the foothills of the Alps just over a decade before. For months she’d battled with the authorities to gain permission to enter a nature reserve and in the end my father pulled strings to get it for her and one assistant. I wanted to see wildflowers and a place untouched by advertising executives, so Suh made me her assistant for the day.
I was recording some crap for my dad as a sort of postcard, which was why I wasn’t looking when she saw the plant. She called out something about a unique plant that wasn’t in the reserve’s database. It wasn’t until she said something about it tasting so good that I stopped what I was doing and paid attention. By the time I got back to her she was convulsing violently. She was unconscious long before the paramedics arrived.
I wrenched the plant from the ground and stuffed it in a bag, not caring about the possible prosecution I faced. The hospital had it tested by the right people, but no one could identify it. Its genetic profile wasn’t listed on the universal genome database and hit the headlines for all of five minutes, which was pretty remarkable at the time.
When Suh woke and wrote that string of numbers, she couldn’t even remember going to the reserve. Then slowly the memories re-formed and she recalled the plant and the urge to eat a seed that had just unfurled from its protective casing before her eyes.
“We knew there was something wrong about it all,” Suh said. “Now I know it wasn’t just me being stupid. It’s a drug keyed to human beings. It compels the person who has found it to eat the seed.”
I thought about the endless questions from the hospital staff, from the reserve keepers, from the universal genome office and her family. At one point I was accused of engineering the plant myself and putting it there to poison her. It was madness. All of it. It was only the testimony and pictures of the reserve staff proving the plant had been there several days before our arrival that cooled the attention on me.
There was speculation about genetic sabotage—a serious problem for specialist crop growers—but when it was revealed that the plant had no identifiable system of pollination, the theory was thrown out. It became a mystery, something for the scientists and academics to publish papers about while I sat at her bedside. By the time Suh was out of the hospital, it was relegated to the annals of genetic history, something only a handful of botanists and specialists continued to be in a frenzy about. The most popular conclusion was that the plant was designed by some wayward genius and planted in the reserve as a prank.
I didn’t believe that for a moment. Someone would have claimed it if nothing else—why do something so difficult if not to gain fame or to prove a point? And if it wasn’t engineered, how did it spontaneously grow there, completely divorced genetically from the local ecosystem? Plants didn’t just spring out of nowhere, not in France anyway. Every square inch of Europe had been cataloged. There wasn’t a living organism that hadn’t been analyzed and put in the UGD. If we’d been hiking in some obscure part of the Amazon—and it would have to be something like a previously undiscovered cave network—I’d have entertained it as an idea. But only because it’s more comforting to accept that than the alternative of not ever knowing.
I looked through the plasglass at the seed. “If I ate this, would . . . would I be like you?”
She came over and put a hand on my shoulder. “No. It’s inert. It’s as useful as a Brussels sprout.”
A spark of anger behind my breastbone. “Did you engineer it that way?”
“No. Of course not. I’ve tried so many times but each one is just . . . plant fiber. They taste like sprouts too.” Seeing my disapproval, she added: “Oh, I tested each one thoroughly first, obviously. I don’t know what I’m missing, but none of them can do anything like the one I ate on Earth. I have learned a lot though. The plant is insanely adaptable. I’ve been able to grow it in vastly different environments and conditions. I haven’t seen any other species able to survive just about anywhere with such success.”
“Weird,” I agreed. “Most plants adapt to fit a particular environment. Which one do you think it would be most successful in?”
She shrugged. “Equally successful in all of them. Or perhaps I should say one hundred percent successful in an environment with humans in it. If an animal ate it, I’m pretty certain it would have no effect on them. You saw the scans of my neocortex just a few months after the coma. I suppose there might be an effect on a primate, but even so, it wouldn’t have the same impact. I’m certain it was artificially made. It doesn’t have any of the features needed to propagate itself, for one thing. We call it a seed, but I don’t think that’s what it really is. Nor a fruit. You want to know something crazy? I’m starting to think it was made by the one I think we’ll find at those coordinates. I think it’s like a . . . biological message in a bottle. It could be that the seeds were cast out across all sorts of places—planets even—waiting for someone to eat one and change, like I did.”
I nodded, used to just letting her speculate aloud. She spoke so fast it was hard to converse with her like we used to. Many mornings I would wake up to essays thousands of words long that the AI had transcribed for her, full of thoughts she’d had while I’d been asleep. Sometimes she’d get frustrated with speech and the time it took for her thoughts to emerge from her lips and be processed by us slow normal people.
If she was right about the seed on Earth being one of many scattered in the hope of finding someone like her, the natural question that followed was, by who? But we’d already talked that out. I had my faith; she had her hope, “untainted,” as she put it, by religion. Even though I’d tried to explain that I could have faith without the dogma and historical baggage of organized religion, she just couldn’t get it, despite that densely populated neocortex of hers. The only thing we truly agreed upon was that Suh had been changed in order to lead us to our destination. It seemed that faith wasn’t required in order to do that. “Do you think it would have changed me in the same way if I’d eaten it instead of you?”
“It might have killed you. It nearly killed me.”
I tried to imagine her having succeeded in replicating the original. Would we take the risk to choose between death or superintelligence? Would we still be able to function as a fledgling society if we were all like her?
“You said it could be abused,” I said. “I don’t see how, if the seed is inert.”
“Not the seed, the pheromone. It compels you to eat the seed, but not just that. It puts you into another state, one that makes you highly suggestible. In the wrong hands, it could be used for all kinds of dark shit.” She took hold of my hands. “That’s why you mustn’t tell anyone about this.”
“Even Mack?”
“Especially Mack.”
“Don’t you trust him?”
“Of course I do! I just don’t think that someone who knows how people work in the way he does should have access to something this potent. He’s been fantastic to us, and we wouldn’t be here without him, but don’t forget how he made his fortune before I came along.”
I hadn’t thought about it for a long time. I’d forgotten what most people did in their previous lives before Suh happened to them. He was the most successful advertising specialist in Europe, arguably the world. The press called him the “desire hacker.”
“There’s nothing that counteracts its effects and it disappears from our system in seconds,” Suh continued. “It doesn’t even leave a synaptic signature like other psychoactive drugs. No. You’re the only person I trust completely, Ren. You wouldn’t use this for yourself like he would, given the chance.”
I think about the tunnel far below me and the plant inside. With a seed in place—even an inert one—the plant is tricked to reproduce the pheromone Suh discovered and confided in me. Mack may have decided to trick everyone, but I gave him the tools to do it. Only I could have made this whole circus sideshow happen.
My fingers play over the knots in the ropes keeping me safe. I imagine untying them and leaping from the topmost pod, experiencing a few seconds of total freedom before oblivion, ending all this here and now. But then I think of Kay examining my broken body and I know I can’t do it. I breathe in and out until I accept that there’s nothing more to do than go home. But something has changed, even though the lies will go on; all the anger I’d focused on Mack I now direct toward myself.