Victoria sat back wondering how it had come to this. …she sat at her desk, ankles crossed, feet up on the desk, a scotch in one hand. It was her only vice, Victoria was a well run machine. Her work was everything to her, even more so than her own daughter. She had hoped

She watched the darkening city skyline out of her floor to ceiling windows that lined her office. The view was one of the reasons she insisted on her office being the corner, being above the city below made her feel powerful, in control.

The Tiangong-1 re-eentry was supposed to be smooth. It wasn’t supposed to result in the nanotechnology escaping and affecting civilians. It especially wasn’t supposed to result in live Civilians. This variance was outside anything they had predicted. Non-tailored nanotech should have killed all of them within hours. Could their illnesses have really been the determining factor? She cursed herself for forgetting to ask if any of them were related. There were obvious ethnic differences but Sibling relationships weren’t always apparent at first glance.

Her field scans were running on the disposable laptop. All the data from every field mission was always sandboxed and run through disposable laptops before being entered into the core system. No one had noticed when she picked up an extra. The data so far was fascinating. The nanobots were attacking the cancer cells and eating away at the endometriosis lesions. There were even signs that the nanotechnology was repairing the pancreas. It had only happened previously with tailored nanotech. For un-tailored nanotech to be performing this way was unheard of. She wished she had been able to get samples of the two dead civilians.

Unfortunately all she had was partial records from the nanobots that remained before she terminated and absorbed them.

Finishing her drink, Victoria called up her displays. While she had to manually interface with the laptop until the data was cleared, she could still use her nanotech to interface with the rest of her systems. She started cross-referencing the information on the five civilians from the resort their flight itineraries and expanded from there. Shortly she had compiled profiles of each of them then started working on medical backgrounds.

The three she had talked with were correct in that the other two didn’t appear to have any medical conditions or family histories of hereditary medical problems. They had lucked out… Until they stumbled across something straight out of their nightmares.

The Tiangong-1 facility had been far larger and more complex than most people realized. Most of the media reported a 7 to 10 ton module when in reality there were multiple modules that size and the entire facility was comparable to the old Skylab complex. That was one of the reasons for a mid-day, mid-ocean splashdown. It limited the visibility to onlookers. Fortunately most of the compromised parts of the facility burned up in the atmosphere, however at least one of the critical experimental modules passed over New Zealand. Her biotech retrieval teams had found most of the components but at least one of them had been tampered with. She hoped that they had found the only people it had come in contact with it. Otherwise New Zealand was likely to have several more missing persons over the next day or so.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

They had already sent out the disabling pulse that would render any surviving nanotech inert. If any of it happened to be inside a living person and shielded from the pulse it might cause the host some health issues, but that was preferable to the secrets getting out.

How she proceeded from this point would be determined in part by how these three variances responded to the system. She would try to keep them as isolated as possible until they understood how to use the nanotechnology. However she needed to be prepared for them to be discovered before they were ready.

Damien certainly wouldn’t approve of her little side project. He was very black and white that one, heavily weighted towards the black. If he knew what she was doing, those three would be dead and disappeared within hours. Fortunately her position protected her from repercussions, but those protections did not extend beyond her person or her position.

***

Farrah looked over at Daniel, with only the moonlight through the open curtains, who seemed to have woken up at her noise.

"Still alive I see?" She asked.

Daniel held his hands up in front of his face looking at the front and back. "Looks like it."

He hesitated, "System. Tutorial."

What appeared to be a computer/video game screen materialized in front of his face. It said, unsurprisingly, [System Tutorial]. He reached out to tap it like a tablet screen, and it blinked at him.

[Integration data unavailable. Do you wish to continue?]

[Y/N]

He looked over at Farah, who was watching him with a puzzled expression. “It’s asking me to do stuff. Have you seen any of this?”

Farah shook her head. “System. Tutorial.”

The system tutorial screen appeared in front of Farrah. She tapped it and the integration data unavailable screen appeared.

“I think we should wake up René before we go any further. We should do this together.”

Farrah leaned over to Renée’s bed and shook her. Renée woke with a start and saw both of them watching her.

“You know, you guys are creeping me out. Watching me sleep like that…it’s not cool.” Renée said.

“We weren't watching you. We were waking you up,” Farrah reassured her, “The system thing, it seems to be working for us now. We thought we should do it together." Farrah said.

"That's what you say now. I believe you. Thousands wouldn't. But I believe you." René shot back sarcastically, eyeing her friends. "Okay, here goes. System. Tutorial." She said. Her eyes widened as the system tutorial screen appeared in front of her. "So this is what it looks like." She tapped the system screen. "Now what?"

"We don't know.” Daniel said, “This is as far as we made it. We figured we should do this together."

“Any guesses as to what ‘integration data’ is?” René asked.

“Well, since this is supposed to be part of some great procedure, I guess that’s all provided to people who are doing this properly. Since we don’t have it we either continue or we don’t.” Daniel shrugged.

“Here goes nothing.” Farrah said as she stabbed forward with her finger.

“Wait!” Daniel yelped, reaching towards her.

“Too late.” Farrah said.

René and Daniel waited, staring intently at Farrah.

“Well, you might as well hit yes.” She said.

They did so and saw a new screen pop up.

[Analyzing.]

“Sort of anti-climatic, don’t you think?” Farrah asked rhetorically.