The Laboratory
There is a difference between finding an abandoned laboratory and finding an abandoned laboratory that still has power. The first is archaeology. The second is trespassing in a place that may not yet have realized everyone left.
Arcadia had seventeen percent auxiliary power remaining, according to the terminal. At the time I had no idea what seventeen percent actually meant. Seventeen percent of a battery bank could mean hours. Seventeen percent of a geothermal reserve could mean years. Seventeen percent of a reactor's usable fuel could mean that I was standing above something that would keep humming long after I died of old age.
Assuming rabbit hybrids got to die of old age. Cheerful thought.
I left one spider beside the containment terminal and sent the others ahead. Spider Three took the central corridor, Four went through an old maintenance access, Six stayed close to me, and poor Five remained strapped to my backpack like a war veteran who had been informed that disability did not excuse him from fieldwork.
I opened the facility directory first. The interface was old enough that it expected typed commands rather than gestures. I liked it immediately.
> FACILITY MAP
ARCADIA BIORESEARCH - LAMPASAS ANNEX
SURFACE:
ADMINISTRATION / RECEIVING - SEALED
VEHICLE ACCESS - SEALED
SECURITY CHECKPOINT - OFFLINE
SUB-LEVEL 01:
MEDICAL INTAKE
STAFF SERVICES
GENERAL LABORATORIES
ARCHIVE A
SUB-LEVEL 02:
GENETIC ENGINEERING
HYBRIDIZATION LABS
SERUM PRODUCTION
SURGICAL THEATERS
CRYOGENIC STORAGE
SUB-LEVEL 03:
SPECIAL PROJECTS
CONTAINMENT ACCESS
ARCHIVE B
SUB-LEVEL 04:
RESTRICTED CONTAINMENT
SUB-LEVEL 05:
RESTRICTED CONTAINMENT
WARNING:
SUBLEVELS 03-05 UNDER PERMANENT BIOLOGICAL LOCKDOWN
I read the line twice. SERUM PRODUCTION. Everything else became secondary.
Leona: "There you are."
For the first time since I'd entered Arcadia, hope stopped being theoretical. They had made serums here. Not simply stored them. Made them. I opened the laboratory index.
Hundreds of archived project numbers appeared. Most had no useful names, only identifiers and access classifications. Tissue regeneration. Musculoskeletal reinforcement. Organ replacement. Neural adaptation. Immunological stabilization. Endocrine restructuring. Hybridization.
I scrolled faster. The facility had not been a hospital. It hadn't even been primarily a medical research center. Arcadia had been developing conversion technology. The difference mattered.
Hospitals used approved hybrid lines. They received standardized serums from licensed manufacturers, matched them to patients, adjusted dosages and performed reconstruction according to protocols written somewhere else. Arcadia had been one of the places writing those protocols. Or trying to.
I opened an old manufacturing record.
HYBRIDIZATION SERUM PRODUCTION - GENERAL
STANDARD PROCESS:
1. HOST GENOME MAPPING
2. DONOR LINE SELECTION
3. COMPATIBILITY MODELING
4. TRAIT ISOLATION
5. EXPRESSION BALANCING
6. REGENERATIVE CARRIER SYNTHESIS
7. IMMUNE MODULATION
8. SERUM STABILIZATION
9. LIVE TISSUE VERIFICATION
10. SUBJECT ADMINISTRATION
WARNING:
UNSTABLE EXPRESSION MAY RESULT IN
- ORGAN FAILURE
- NEURAL DAMAGE
- LOSS OF HOST PHENOTYPE
- UNCONTROLLED MUTATION
- SYSTEMIC REJECTION
- DEATH
I stared at the final item.
Leona: "Good. Nice to see death made the list."
I already knew conversion was complicated. I'd just spent a month being educated about that against my will. What mattered was step four. Trait isolation. Not entire donor replacement. Traits.
If Arcadia could isolate traits, it could theoretically remove them too. Or overwrite them. Maybe. I wasn't stupid enough to conclude that after reading one screen. I was desperate enough to investigate it.
I downloaded the entire general serum directory to my tablet, then another copy to the laptop because redundancy is what separates engineers from people who eventually learn the importance of backups through suffering. Then I started exploring. The upper portions of Arcadia had been deliberately abandoned. That became obvious quickly.
Sub-Level One looked like the skeleton of a workplace someone had expected never to see again. Offices stood open with drawers emptied. Lockers had been cleared. Computer towers were missing from several desks. Personal items were rare. No photographs. No mugs. No coats left hanging behind doors.
They hadn't fled without warning. At least not at first. Someone had packed. Someone had removed valuable equipment. Someone had made decisions about what was worth taking. And then they'd sealed the place. The main receiving area proved it.
Spider Four reached it before I did and sent back images of a space large enough to drive trucks through. I followed twenty minutes later after navigating an access corridor where half the ceiling panels had collapsed.
The chamber was enormous. Even in darkness I could tell. My flashlight illuminated painted traffic lines on the floor, loading bays, cargo lifts and two wide vehicle tunnels leading toward the surface. Arcadia hadn't been supplied through the little maintenance hatch I'd used. That had been an emergency exit.
The real entrance could have swallowed a convoy. It was also gone. At the far end of the loading hall, the vehicle tunnel ended in concrete. Not a door. Concrete. Someone had filled the entire passage. Meters of it, judging by the structural scans.
The surface-facing side had probably once been disguised as natural hillside or an ordinary industrial property. Whatever had existed above was gone now. Underground, the seal remained. Time had damaged it. A crack ran from floor to ceiling near the center, wide enough for roots to grow through. Moisture had stained the concrete black. Pieces had fallen away along one edge, exposing rusted reinforcement rods.
Spider Three climbed into the largest gap. I watched its feed. Thirty centimeters. Forty. Then rubble. No route through.
Leona: "They really didn't want visitors."
That wasn't quite right. A sealed vehicle tunnel told a different story. They hadn't been trying to keep people from entering. They'd been trying to make sure nobody ever needed to enter again.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
There were cheaper ways to close a facility. Lock the gates. Weld the doors. Disconnect utilities. Pouring enough concrete to erase your truck entrance was commitment.
I looked back toward the corridor marked SUBLEVEL 03. So was maintaining biological containment for decades afterward. The good feeling got slightly smaller. The bad feeling stretched its legs.
I returned to the laboratory wing. Sub-Level Two had survived better. The fire doors there were sealed tightly enough to protect much of the equipment from moisture and dust. I had to bypass two dead access systems manually, and one door required twenty minutes of swearing, a screwdriver, Spider Six and a highly illegal relationship with its locking solenoid.
When it finally opened, the laboratory lights came on automatically. Only every fourth panel. Dim. Flickering. Beautiful.
I stood in the doorway. Rows of benches stretched across the room. Glass-fronted cabinets lined the walls. Centrifuges sat beneath protective covers. Two large sequencing systems occupied a central station. A robotic liquid-handling array rested beside sealed reagent racks. There were microscopes, tissue incubators, gene synthesis modules, bioreactors and several machines I recognized only because I had stolen manuals for newer versions years earlier.
I forgot that my ribs hurt. I forgot the helicopter. I forgot the coyotes. I walked inside.
Leona: "Oh..."
That was probably the most religious sound I had ever made. I touched the nearest synthesis unit. Dust. I wiped it away. Arcadia branding appeared beneath.
GENE-ASSEMBLY PLATFORM - G7
Old. Obsolete. Still extraordinary. The kind of machine that had probably cost more than our farm when it was new. I opened the maintenance panel.
Internal components intact. No rodent damage. No obvious corrosion. I checked the power bus. Disconnected from auxiliary supply.
That explained why containment still had power. Arcadia had shut down everything nonessential. Smart. Annoying. Potentially reversible.
My heartbeat sped up. I moved to the next machine. Automated centrifuge. Functional mechanically. Cryogenic sample preparation system.
Internal seal compromised. Probably useless without repair. Sterile synthesis hood. Filters dead, but replaceable. Genetic sequencer.
Old optical array. Possibly functional. Protein synthesizer. Carrier formulation unit. Three medical-grade infusion pumps.
An automated tissue analyzer. Two surgical regeneration beds. And at the far end of the room, behind a reinforced glass partition: A serum assembly suite. I stared through the glass.
There were six synthesis columns arranged around a central control station. Tubing ran from reagent reservoirs into a compact bioreactor, then onward through purification stages toward a row of sealed output ports. I knew enough to understand what I was looking at. Not enough to use it. Not yet. That distinction did very little to restrain my smile.
Leona: "You beautiful old bastard."
Spider Six climbed onto the workstation beside me.
Leona: "Not you."
Its optic rotated.
Leona: "You're also beautiful. Don't get insecure."
I found the serum suite documentation in a wall cabinet. Actual paper. Hundreds of pages. Technical diagrams. Calibration procedures. Emergency shutdown instructions. I almost hugged it. Instead I sat on the floor and started reading.
Arcadia's serum systems were modular. That was the important part. The machines didn't manufacture one fixed hybrid type. Researchers supplied a host genome, donor sequences and a target expression profile. The system then synthesized a regenerative carrier designed to integrate the selected genetic material while suppressing immune rejection.
Modern hospitals used descendants of this technology. Arcadia's version was crude by comparison. Crude did not mean simple. It meant dangerous. The safety margins were terrible.
The system expected researchers to perform extensive simulation and tissue testing before administering anything to a living subject. But it could do it. It could manufacture conversion serum.
I sat there reading the same paragraph four times. Then I looked down at my hands. White fur. Tiny fingers. Rabbit Hybrid.
Leona: "Maybe."
That word frightened me more than anything else in the facility. Maybe I could change myself. Maybe. Not today. Probably not tomorrow.
But the equipment existed. The tools existed. The documentation existed. Data existed. I looked around again with entirely different eyes.
Arcadia wasn't shelter anymore. It was a workshop. A terrible, illegal, abandoned workshop full of biological technology old enough to have killed several generations of graduate students. My kind of place.
I started cataloguing. That took nearly an hour.
Functional or probably functional: Two gene sequencers. One protein synthesis array. Four centrifuges. One serum carrier assembly unit. Three tissue-analysis stations. Two automated cell culture systems. One surgical regeneration bed with intact diagnostics.
The second bed had suffered coolant damage and smelled like something had died inside it before I was born. I marked that one NO on the tablet.
Potentially repairable: The cryogenic unit. Sterile filtration system. Two synthesis columns. One medical imaging platform. The main surgical manipulator.
Unknown: Everything connected to the lower-level containment network. I was not checking that yet.
I found reagent storage next. Mostly empty. That was expected. Biological reagents did not politely remain viable for twenty-eight years simply because the plot required them. Some sealed chemical precursors might still be useful. Frozen genetic samples depended entirely on whether cryogenic backup had survived. I checked the facility map again.
CRYOGENIC STORAGE - SUBLEVEL 02, SECTION D
Power status:
STANDBY.
My breath caught. Standby meant something had preserved enough power to keep at least part of it alive. I marked the location. Then continued searching the records. There were hundreds of serum batches. Most names meant nothing to me.
AR-12. AR-18. HRA-04. Graft Stabilizer Series B. Adaptive Reconstruction Series. Military Trauma Variant. Neural-Compatible Conversion Carrier. Then I found a directory marked:
ADVANCED INTEGRATION PROGRAMS
I opened it. Several folders appeared.
PROJECT ORCHARD
PROJECT BASILISK
PROJECT CHRYSALIS
PROJECT CHIMERA
I frowned. Those weren't routine medical names. Orchard. Basilisk. Chrysalis. Chimera. Research projects with mythology names are rarely about curing seasonal allergies. I selected PROJECT_CHRYSALIS first. Access denied.
Leona: "Rude."
I tried Basilisk. Denied. Orchard. Partial access. Chimera. The terminal hesitated. Then:
ACCESS LEVEL 4 REQUIRED
I leaned closer.
Leona: "We'll see about that."
The terminal did not appear intimidated. I connected the tablet and started inspecting the permissions architecture. Ancient security. Closed network. Administrator credentials long expired. Very promising. While my cracking routine worked, I searched the open manufacturing indexes for one particular term.
OVERWRITE.
No results. I tried:
SECONDARY CONVERSION.
Seventeen results. My hands stopped. I opened the first. Most concerned patients whose original hybrid integrations had failed. Arcadia had experimented with reinforcing or modifying existing hybrid DNA without removing it.
Not enough. Next. Trait supplementation. Next. Metabolic correction. Next. Donor-line stabilization. Then:
SECONDARY INTEGRATION TEST 44
OBJECTIVE:
COMPLETE SUPPRESSION OF PRIOR HYBRID EXPRESSION
THROUGH DOMINANT REPLACEMENT SEQUENCE
I stopped breathing. Complete suppression. Prior hybrid expression. Dominant replacement. I read the report.
Failure. Subject died. Next. Similar test. Failure. Next. Partial success followed by systemic rejection. Next. Failure. Next. Permanent neurological injury.
The excitement cooled. Of course. There was no magic button labeled REMOVE RABBIT. People had tried. People had died.
I kept reading anyway. Because buried among the failures was proof of concept. Arcadia knew hybrid biology could be overwritten. They simply hadn't known how to make it safe. I sat back.
Leona: "Okay."
My voice sounded very small in the empty laboratory. This was possible. Potentially. Theoretically. With enough work.
Enough data. Enough understanding. Maybe years. I'd already promised myself years. I looked at the serum assembly suite again.
The machines didn't care that I was Domestic. The sequencer didn't care that I was F-Rank. Genetics did not recognize civic classifications. There was something wonderfully honest about that.
My tablet chimed. The access routine had finished. PROJECT_CHIMERA permissions bypassed.
I turned toward the terminal. A new directory tree had opened. Dozens of files. Experimental logs. Serum compositions. Subject records. Neural studies. Containment protocols. One file sat at the bottom.
FINAL_REPORT_MERIDIAN_1998
And beside it:
STATUS: EMERGENCY ARCHIVE
My good feeling vanished. I looked toward the corridor leading back to Sub-Level Three. Containment access. Seventeen percent power. The laboratory suddenly felt colder.
I could have opened the report immediately. I didn't. Instead I checked the serum equipment once more, almost reassuring myself it was real. It was.
If I could restore power, repair the damaged systems and understand Arcadia's research, this place could manufacture a hybridization serum. Possibly even one capable of replacing what the hospital had done to me. I'd found what I came west hoping to find.
A chance.
Behind that chance was a sealed laboratory project called Chimera and two entire underground levels somebody had buried beneath concrete rather than clean out. I rested both hands on Dad's bent staff.
Leona: "Of course there's a catch."
There was always a catch. I selected the final report. And began to read.