Chapter 6 : Collapse
1519 Words
The walk back to his aunt's home was a procession through an altered world. The camp was unchanged—the same dust, the same tents, the same tired faces—but the air itself was altered. It vibrated with a new energy, a tide of talk and surreptitious glances that followed Dawud like a banner.
He kept his head down, didn't look up, but he could feel them. The glances were no longer disdainful or pitying; they were sharp, inquiring, astounded, fearful. He heard his name, "Dawud Jamil," being passed from lip to lip, no longer preceded by the prefix "that failed student" but by a new, implicit one. The one who… The one with…
He had crossed a line. He had worked a miracle in a world where miracles had been cheapened by endured years earlier. He had done the impossible, and in doing so, had made himself a target. For hope. For inspection. For things he couldn't yet imagine.
He pushed open the door to his home, the familiar stark inside a refuge and an imprisonment simultaneously. The relative darkness was a welcome respite. He stood in the doorway against the coarse wood, its solidity a touchstone in a world rapidly losing definition. His heart was a frantic drum against the bone of his chest, and a pounding headache was building at the base of his skull, a deep, intellectual pain unlike anything he'd ever known.
"Dawud?" His aunt called from the central room. She emerged from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. Her eyes scanned him at once—his pale face, sweat-soaked and clammy, the trembling of his hands, the dark streak of dried blood underneath his nose. Her face transformed from curiosity to maternal concern. "Ya ibnī, what is wrong. You're ill."
"Me… tired, Ammit," he muttered, the falsehood shaky. "It was… noisy at Leila's."
Her eyes tightened. Rumors spread fast in this place. She had best already heard them. "They are telling… They are telling little Amina is better. That she woke up. That the yellow sickness has passed." She stated it as fact, not a question, and waited for him to confirm. Her eyes swept his, looking for the boy that she had known, and beholding a stranger flashing in their depths.
He couldn't even glance her way. He nodded indistinctly, shoving away from the door. "The body is strong sometimes. She must have fought it off." The words tasted like ash. He needed to be alone. He needed to understand what was occurring to him.
He made his way towards the back room, but a bout of coughing inside stopped him dead in his tracks. It was Youssef. The sound was worse than before—deeper, wetter, a rattling gasp at the end of each spasm that attested to lungs full of fluid.
The sound was a splash of cold water on the dying euphoria of his victory. Amina was rescued. But his brother remained dying. The System was real. The authority was in his hands. He could bring this to an end. Now.
The thought was the call of the sirens, impossible to avoid and terrifying.
He pushed open the door. Youssef was lying stretched out, his body trembling with the effort of each spasm. His skin was hot with fever, his breathing a shallow, rasping pant between fits. He looked up at Dawud coming in, his eyes being empty with illness and a great hope.
"Dawud…?" he rasped. "The cough… it is… to breathe."
The words were a knife to Dawud’s heart. The System’s interface flickered at the edge of his perception, a phantom pressure waiting to be acknowledged. It wanted to be used. I was hungry.
“I know, zghir,” Dawud said, his voice soft. He knelt beside the pallet, placing a hand on Youssef’s burning forehead. The heat was intense. “I’m here. I’m going to help.”
He closed his eyes, not in prayer, but in focus. He stretched out to the System, to that whirring, great presence in his head. He called upon it.
Nothing happened.
Panic, cold and knife-sharp, coursed through him. One-time only? A freak? Had he drained it with Amina?
He concentrated harder, the thudding in his head building into a stinging, stabbing pain. Come on! he cursed himself inwardly. I need you! For him!
And then, it did.
It didn't roll over his senses this time. It hit him. The world did not melt; it was ripped from him in a savage flailing motion. The dark room, his brother's ill body, the hum of his aunt in the other room—all of them were wiped away in a burst of blinding, white-hot light and a crash of static.
He was back in the Genome Nexus, but it was not the serene, star-studded wasteland of his previous visit. This was a storm. The sand beneath his feet was boiling in a manic whirlpool. The heavens were a turbulent, mauve purple, electric with blasts of green energy that looked like festering genetic code. The shimmering Arabic characters of the interface pulsed crazily, glitching, fragments of text cracking and re-forming randomly.
[WARNING: HOST BIOLOGICAL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.] [NEUROLOGICAL STRESS: CRITICAL.] [SYSTEM STABILIZATION FAILING.]
The System's tone was distorted, overlaid with a rough, digital squeal. The first rewrite fee was overdue. He'd overdriven his mind too fast, too hard. He wasn't just a user; he was the processor. And he was overheating.
[Subject: Youssef Jamil. Age: 16.] [Status: Critical. Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection. Advanced pulmonary involvement. Sepsis onset.] [Genetic Analysis: Attempting…]
The double helix of Youssef's DNA shimmered into focus, but it was tenuous, shifting. Passed through it was the bacterial infection, a knotted, fibrous matrix many times more complex and tenacious than the hepatitis virus. The System started its analysis, and Dawud's headache blew apart.
As if his head were cracking in half. He was screaming, but his sound was consumed in the silence. Data—huge, unreadable streams of genetic data—flooded his mind. He wasn't just seeing Youssef's genome; he was feeling it. The millions of base pairs, the protein coding, the mutations, the damage caused by infection. Too much. A human brain wasn't built to hold this.
[ANALYSIS OVERLOAD.] [HOST NEURAL PATHWAYS SATURATED.]
The world was on its side. The tempest in the Nexus grew stronger. He could feel his grip on reality, on his own body, unraveling. He was losing himself in the flow of information, his soul evaporating into the limitless code of life and sickness.
He had to focus. He had to find the target. He fought through the pain, through the torrent of information, forcing his will against the bacterial infection. He saw thick, resilient strands, tenaciously anchored in Youssef's lung tissue. He tried to build the rewrite sequence, to visualize the bacteria being peeled away, eliminated.
But his brain was clouded by the pain. The sequence was hazy, nebulous.
[REWRITE PROTOCOL IN PROGRESS: PARAMETERS NOT DEFINED.] [WARNING: GENERIC EDITING IDENTIFIED. LIKELIHOOD OF HOST COLLATERAL DAMAGE: 87%].
No! He tried to pull back, to hone the order, but it was like trying to halt the tide of a wave with one's own fingers. The System was executing his hysterical, unfinished concept.
A new, searing heat exploded in his own chest. His lungs were filled with fire. He gasped, and in fact, his body contorted. He was vaguely aware of hearing his aunt's cry out his name, of Youssef's faint, frightened cry.
In the Nexus, corruption was insidiously creeping. The green, crackling energy was lapping the edges of Youssef's DNA chain. The System was trying to obey, but his commands were too vague, too destructive. He wasn't attempting to kill the bacteria; he was attempting to annihilate everything.
[CEASE EXECUTION!] he screamed into nothing, but the System, built from his own volition, was a cycle of his own fear.
The world beyond the Nexus exploded in grotesque snapshots. The feel of the hard ground against his face. The iron flavor of blood and dust in his mouth. The pain of his aunt weeping. The heat. The fiendish, hellish heat.
The Nexus desert sun and the fever burning its way through his system were the same. The sand pounding him was the camp dust. The corrupted, glitched code was the disease coursing through his own veins, a feedback loop of disaster.
He had tried to play God with a human brain. He had reached for power that he was unable to control, and it was killing him. He was the disease and the cure, the programmer and the virus.
The last rational thought that went through his mind was not one of fear, but one of bad, cruel understanding. This was the price. This was the cost of evolution. It wasn't clean. It wasn't kind. It was a dirty, bloody, risky do-over. And he was the guinea pig.
The agony reached its peak. The tempest in the Nexus consumed him. Glitching text flashed one final time, a last, screaming warning he could no longer decipher.
Then, there was a flame.
And then, there was nothing.
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- Writer
