***

As Tvorh opened the quartz door that led to the Libraratory, he half expected to hear the crack of the pistol and feel the bullet entering the back of his brain. For the moment, however, Senrii was as good as her word, whistling with awe as she brushed past him onto the ramp. She swept her eyes up and down the gilded hallway, pausing here and there as her vision took in elements of interest.

“Wow, Tvorh. You do not disappoint,” she said, seating herself at the edge of the ramp and kicking her feet as they dangled out over the open air. “Almost makes up for that ear-splitting humming you were doing on the way down.”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize I was doing it.”

“Huh.” She sounded thoughtful. “Yeah, well. Anyway. See that lab? Sign says ‘Genophagic Research,’ written in Late High Post-Exarchian. This was late, late stuff. Must have been running right up to the Pandemic. Maybe even researching a cure while the rest of the world disintegrated.”

“It really is Last Era.”

“Yup. And well preserved. I mean…” Senrii tilted her head. “I wonder what we could learn from them.”

“That’s why I brought you down here, wasn’t it?”

Senrii swept her eyes up and down the concourse. “No. I mean, did you know that they used to do direct gengineering on people during the Last Era?”

“Yeah, I read something about that. It’s taboo, right? Because the genophage had something to do with direct gengineering?”

Senrii looked at him sideways. “You’ve done a lot of reading for a street rat.”

“I Wasn’t always one.”

“Anyway, yeah, that’s what the stories say. The bloodlines that survived the genophage were the ones that had been gengineered many generations before, if ever. The ones that got wiped?” She swiped her fingers across her throat. “All recently gengineered. Direct gengineering needs some specific genes turned on and others turned off in order to work, so everybody who was recently altered had that same pattern of activated and deactivated genes.”

“Right. Don’t lots of diseases target common patterns in genes? That’s why it’s so important to have genetic diversity. So one disease doesn’t kill everybody.”

Senrii shot a finger gun at him. “Kid’s over the target. Yup, the genophage targeted the patterns common to all gengineered people.”

“Why didn’t it affect gengineered animals?”

Senrii shrugged. “Nobody’s really sure. Maybe because we didn’t change them so much? No, we’ve been altering them for millennia. You’d think the genophage would have kicked in.”

“How about Chimera Syndrome?”

“What about it?”

“Well…” Tvorh paused. This was probably a touchy subject for Senrii, her being a Maga and all. “I used to go with my father into the Archives here. He was a janitor. We never had much money, so those books were all the entertainment I tended to get.”

Senrii nodded sagely, which was funny, since she didn’t look much like Tvorh imagined a sage to look. “Poor kid.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. What I mean is that, I remember reading that Chimera Syndrome kicked in — for blue-bloods, I mean — at about the same time that the genophage happened.”

“Oh. Yeah, that.” Senrii glanced at the ceiling and drew a deep breath. “How much do you know about the Symbiont, anyway?”

“Just what I’ve read, and that was back when I was a kid.”

“Okay. So we don’t have really good records of Chimera Syndrome from before the Pandemic, and you’re right; most inquirers agree that it’s probably linked to the genophage. Thing about Magi is, we still have to contend with Chimera Syndrome.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that Magi can still turn into Chimeras.”

Tvorh blinked. “How is that possible? Nobody directly gengineers Magi. I mean, there’d be no reason to.” The whole point of having a Symbiont was that you didn’t need to be gengineered to do amazing things. The SOPHIOS could take care of it for you.

Senrii clucked her tongue. “Short version? SOPHIOS-based gengineering race on one’s own body. The Symbiont gets too far awake, starts changing us rapidly, and we try to use the Symbiont to change ourselves back at the same time. Chromosomes get added, left out, changed here and there. Before you know it, you’re a walking nightmare.”

“So not every Chimera is a Chimerical offspring.”

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“Nope. Some of them are ex-Magi. And yeah, if you do an autopsy on those Chimeras, they’ve got signs of genophage infection, too. Chimera Syndrome and the genophage are related.”

Tvorh let this digest for a moment. “I killed a Chimera earlier today.”

“Seriously? How?”

Tvorh pointed down the concourse at the rendering pool. “Dropped him in there.”

“Smart kid. Wow. Killed a Chimera. You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

Tvorh’s mind had already moved on. “Wait. If Chimera Syndrome for Magi is somehow related to genophagic death for gengineered red-bloods—”

“Yeah.” Senrii’s big brown eyes glinted up at Tvorh. “Some people think the Symbiont itself got infected, and now the genophage is piggybacking off of it, looking for a chance to convert Magi.”

“That’s… that’s horrible.”

Senrii shrugged. “You learn to live with it. Don’t actuate too many STIGMOI at once, because that means you have to eat like a whale to keep your mass-energy levels up; don’t deactivate STIGMOI too rapidly, because that means you’re leaving the Symbiont excessively awake as it spins down, and it’ll use that extra energy to try to convert you. It’s a balancing act. You seriously never learned any of this?”

“I was a kid. And I’m a red-blood. There wasn’t a lot of need for me to know about it, was there? And you don’t meet a lot of blue-bloods down in the Chasm.”

“Magi, if you would. Or Generosi, since you’ll have a hard time meeting a Magus who isn’t also a Generosus. Well, I guess there are the Sodalitatis, but that’s a special case.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s fine by me, but when my dad meets you, he’ll throw a fit if you call him a blue-blood to his face. Yeah, my dad. What? Did you seriously think that after you delivered on your end of the bargain, I was gonna renege on mine?” Senrii hopped to her feet. “Anyway, before we head back up, I’d like to take a look around so I can make an accurate report. You mind?”

“No, but it’s a long way down.”

“Way ahead of you.” Senrii planted her hands on the edge of the rock.

Then she hopped off the side.

“Wait!” Tvorh dropped to his knees at the edge of the ledge. Senrii hung a few feet down, smiling impishly at him. “What? How—” Senrii wiggled her hands, and Tvorh realized she wasn’t holding on to the rock itself, but rather was gripping thin strands between her fingers. The silk striped the side of the rock up to the edge and broke into a Y, their ends sticking on the ground where Senrii had placed her hands before she had leapt off.

“Benefits of being a Magus,” she called musically. “Come on down. They’ll hold us both.”

“Are you sure?”

Senrii rolled her eyes. “If I wanted to kill you, I could have shot you. Yes, I’m sure.”

“All right.” Tvorh grabbed the silken strands and followed suit.

“Thought it would take more than that to convince you,” Senrii said as they hand-over-handed their way to the ground.

“You told me it would hold. I believed you.”

“Kid, for someone who doesn’t trust me, you sure trust me a lot.”

“You’ve proven yourself.”

“By not shooting you in the back of the head?”

Tvorh scoffed. “Maga Senrii, I live in the Chasm.”

Upon reaching the ground, Tvorh and Senrii began walking toward the central rendering pool. Senrii read off the names of the hallways that glowed on the strange gray films as they passed by. “Apotheosis Analytics,” she said. “Early Sodality stuff, I guess. Co-Temporal Entanglements Inquiries— Synapsis research, maybe? Functional Posthuman Endstate Studies; that must be Tool analysis.” She paused before a hallway not far from the rendering pool. “Neurocomputational Pangeologic Presence,” she read. “That’s where the good stuff’s gonna be.”

“Computing?”

“More importantly, whatever they were studying at the time they all died from the Pandemic is still going to be loaded up in the Tool.”

“How do you know the Tool’s still functional?”

Senrii waved around her. “Lights. Doors. The rendering pool opened when you killed the Chimera, right?”

“Yes, but—”

“Functioning Tool.”

“That doesn’t mean that—”

“Oh, come on, Tvorh. It’s worth a shot. Don’t you want to know?”

He did want to know “Okay. Let’s go.”

“Great. Come on, then.”

Senrii jammed on the button for a door marked “102-111: Data Input.” “Broken,” she growled when the door did not deign to open.

“One of these worked earlier.” Tvorh pressed the blister-like bulge that Senrii had just touched. A faint green glow suffused the fluid with the device, and the door dilated open. Seeing Senrii’s irate look, he said, “You probably just didn’t press it hard enough.”

“Whatever. Let’s see what’s inside.”

There was a circular control panel, covered with devices and levers and containing a foot-wide inset circular segment at eye level, in the center of the room. “Behold the wisdom of Senrii, mortals, and cower,” she said in a deep, booming voice, and immediately set about pulling the switches and levers and watching the characters change on the gray readout screens. “That should do it,” she said at last, and pressed a button near the circular inset.

Nothing happened.

“Oh, great. It’s stuck.” She flipped some more levers, then reset them to their original positions and pressed the button again. The machine remained inert. “Well, so much for that idea,” she fumed.

Tvorh couldn’t help himself. He reached past her and pressed the button. “Cell 102-111: releasing input,” the feminine voice that sounded so much like his mother said, and the circle burst outward.

A cylindrical device containing tens, perhaps hundreds, of vials hung outward from the console. Senrii glanced at it, then back at Tvorh. She narrowed her eyebrows.

“What?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.” Though Tvorh turned back to the cylinder and the rest of her sentence was the barest whisper, his excellent ears nonetheless caught it: “That you need to know about.” Then she spoke up. “Anyway, I’m gonna spend some time gathering this stuff up. You… take a look around, I guess. I’ll be in here for a little while.”

“Don’t you need my help?”

“I got pockets in this thing.” She motioned to her skintight suit, and the instant pounding of Tvorh’s heart made him sincerely wish she hadn’t. “It’ll take me some time to get them all squared away. Pretty boring, and you can’t really help with that, so why don’t you make yourself useful, go out and report back when you’ve found something?”

So Tvorh wandered the halls of Neurocomputational Pangeologic Presence, opening doors here and there, peering inside, finding the contents of the rooms impenetrable, and wandering onward.

He opened cell 102-145: Auxiliary Computational Capacity like any other.

The door dilated open, revealing a room spherical from floor to ceiling. A vertical mass of twisting nerve matter stood like a pillar in the center of the chamber, forming a bulbous pustule of thick fluid just large enough to cover a person. There was indeed someone floating in the fluid beyond the cyst’s transparent flesh. Hair black with wetness floated with the gentle pulses of the nerves, criss-crossing pale flesh.

He intended it to be a statement, but it came out a question. “Mother?”