It hurt when they looked at Freya. Their eyes lanced through the numbness, and she quested towards that pain, wanting to feel anything. Freya stared at Lynn and Lassa. No one seemed to know where to begin. The meeting room was all cinderblocks and sickly green paint.
“I’m sorry,” Freya croaked, her voice rough with disuse. They looked at her with pity, and there was a pang of anger before she told herself pity was completely appropriate.
“Freya…” Lassa struggled.
“Just take it,” Freya begged her to accept the apology. “I can’t fight anymore. I don’t have the strength.” They’d barely begun talking and, already, she was on the verge of breaking down.
“It’s not—” Lassa began, and Lynn set her hand over Lassa’s. Their eyes met.
“Okay,” Lassa nodded. “I am very sorry as well. If you’re not ready, we can come back another day.”
Freya shook her head.
“I think this is as good as it gets,” she admitted.
“Are you okay? I mean, obviously not, but is there anything we can do for you?”
“I need to get out of here.”
Lynn took point.
“If we can get you released from the psychiatric hold, I can get you out on bond. There’s a lot of media attention. it’s going to make it harder to cut a deal with the prosecutor. It will probably be a million-dollar bond.”
“Can we afford that?” Freya asked.
“Easily. Things in my case have gone much better. Hiidenkirnu has dropped everything.”
“Why?”
“Did something happen to it during the shooting?” Lassa asked, dropping her voice. Her eyes rolled towards the camera in the corner of the room.
“There’s no audio recording permitted,” Lynn confirmed. “I made sure of it.”
“What happened to the Starball?” Lassa asked.
“It burned up. Just disintegrated,” Freya lied. Lassa and Lynn both stared at her. She stared back, daring them call her out. But the interrogator gleam was not there. They were worried about Freya.
“I felt it was gone. After that night, my thinking became clear again. I was able to figure out where all the tests led. We made an incredible discovery, Freya. It was leading us to an answer.”
“What was the answer?” Freya asked.
“An extremely precise and rapid method for DNA manipulation in live cells. A huge leap over CRISPR. Freya, it will be bigger than electricity.” Even in this terrible place, Lassa could barely contain her excitement.
“It’s not a weapon?” Freya scowled. Lassa shook her head emphatically.
“It’s a tool. It’s the end of cancer, the end of HIV, and thousands of other things. It’s too early to tell for sure, but I suspect it will be the end of aging. It’s an incredible gift.”
Freya locked up. Everything she assumed was predicated on the Starball wiping everyone out, betraying her because Dan was going to give them away. She was cast into confusion.
“Does anyone know? Hiidenkirnu, Santonelli?”
“No one, and I’m not telling anyone yet. There are some small charges associated with all this, but I think we can get out of it. We set up a dead-man’s switch, a document with everything about this. In the event something happens to us, the story and my research will be distributed. But we’re not going to release the full story yet. Hiidenkirnu only knows about the organisms, not the origin of them.”
“What organisms?”
“Okay, here is my theory. keep in mind this is still very much in flux. I think the probes we were injected with are little factories that create synthetic viruses. I’m infected with a whole ecosystem of them, and I assume you are as well. Two of them, which I have named Xenovirus Kylix and Kantharos, can be used to execute genetic modifications to targeted live cells. Kylix performs the modifications, and Kantharos acts as a gate on Kylix, gating its replication and guiding it. It’s like a kind of symbiosis. I believe they were specifically designed for this purpose. This is only two of them. I have identified twenty-seven novel viruses so far.”
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
“I was very sick for a few days after I was jabbed,” Freya remembered. “I thought I just caught a bad cold.”
“Most likely it had no idea how our immune responses worked. It used you to figure them out.”
The phrase hung in the air. Used you. An ecosystem of alien microorganisms. Shards in all of them.
“If the Starball is dead, will the viruses die, too? I mean, did they deactivate?” Freya corrected herself before Lassa could tell her viruses weren’t alive.
“They’re still very much active. Good evidence for my theory that they are synthetic and manufactured is that they’ve stopped iterating. When the Starball was active, they changed rapidly, far faster than mutation alone could explain. The process was already slowing, though. In hindsight, I think it had reached its conclusion and was simply refining.”
“What’s the conclusion?” Freya asked.
“I have no idea what its ultimate intent was, but it likely involved a massive modification to humanity. Some huge adaptation, or ascension. I would assume it had something to do with Unity you and Dan experienced.”
Freya clenched her eyes shut and gripped the table. Her stomach churned. There was silence in the room while they stared at her.
“It killed Dan. Malcolm was infected. The Starball was controlling him.”
“Perkele?! When did it infect him?
“He surprised me and took the Starball out of my hands, then he threw it in the river. I had to wade out to get it back.”
“Why would the orb do that?”
“I don’t know. This whole time, it’s been manipulating him, manipulating us. I don’t understand why. I assumed it was the extermination angle.”
“Why would it kill Dan?”
“He wanted to expand Unity, to bring more people in. I didn’t, I just wanted him.”
The words physically hurt in her throat, like she was coughing up glass. The pitiful stares burned on.
“Did they find the shards when they autopsied them?” Freya asked. It was one of several worries burning at her.
“No, and they wouldn’t unless they knew exactly what to look for. They’re very, very small. Both have been buried, they would have to be disinterred. I didn’t think of that. We should absolutely—”
That was too much for Freya. She put her head on the table and would not rise until the hour was up, no matter how they tried to snap her out of it.
* * *
It was two more weeks before Freya was released from the psychiatric wing and moved into the regular jail.
The awful meeting with Lynn and Lassa gave her the energy to hide her despair, and they finally got the combination of medicine that let her sleep through most nights. She still drifted off all the time, just putting on a performance, but it was good enough for the awful psychiatrist.
The bond was only half a million dollars. It seemed insane to say it like that, only half a million, but Lynn warned the trial costs would easily be higher, and they wouldn’t be recoverable. They would have to use another law firm for that. Even if she could have handled a murder case, Lynn had too many conflicts of interest.
She wasn’t in danger of being disbarred, since they agreed to say they were dating prior to the establishment of the attorney-client relationship, but the press associated with the trial was still terrible for her business.
Freya began to miss jail before she had even completed the discharge process. For two days, she had dreaded the drive with Lassa. It was a sunless day, but everything still seemed too bright.
They were silent in the car for almost an hour before Lassa made her first real attempt at conversation, chattering about the progress they were making at Hiidenkirnu, the new scientists they had hired. Freya cut her off midway through, saying something about the Nobel Prize.
“Why didn’t you come visit me?” Freya asked, more to shut Lassa up than because she cared. There was a long pause. The slush hissed under the BMW’s tires.
“I was afraid,” Lassa admitted, the sentence stuck halfway. She had to force it out of her throat.
“Afraid of what?”
“Unity. I was afraid it would happen to us, too. I think it would kill me. I haven’t been good, Freya. I haven’t ever been good. Randall was the good part.”
“I understand,” Freya said, and she really did.
“Are you going to kill yourself?” Lassa asked, terribly abrupt. The question had been burning in her for some time.
“No,” Freya lied.
“Will you talk with Garbuglio before you do?” Lassa asked, ignoring her denial. She wasn’t stupid.
“No,” Freya said, her voice leaden.
“Please,” Lassa begged. “Please, Freya. Talk to him, give it some time.”
“No.”
“I carried you in my body. I gave birth to you. I fed you. I took care of you all your life. I am begging you now, please, talk to the man before you do something you can’t undo.”
Freya didn’t answer her for ten miles. She counted the green markers jutting from the snowbanks as they whipped past.
“I will talk with him before I do anything,” Freya said, unsure if she was lying.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
There was nothing else for them. The sun set just after 4 PM. When they got home, she went to her room and found the Ovation in its case on her bed, but she ignored it. One was the last song she would ever play. Her eyes went to the corner of the room, to a halo of yellow leaves on the carpet.
No one had watered Yggdrasil. The tree was dead.