Heroics

PROMPT: Turns out that the purpose of life is war. Humans are self-multiplying shock troops, left to our own until our numbers get high enough to be useful in the ongoing galactic war. Today our previously thought to be useless DNA has been flipped to ON.

“When I say ‘flipped on,’ I don’t mean there was a physical switch thrown, all at once, I...”

“Do you mean that the mechanism went from a passive, stand-by state to an active, doing-things state?”

“I... yes...” The two men turned a corner, Doctor Hamblin taking the wide outside and Colonel Jacobi cutting the inside. There was another long corridor; Hamblin, new to the space, wondered if the maze-like atmosphere had any other purpose than to allow Jacobi to walk while he talked. He fully expected that after thirty more intense-dialogue-filled seconds they would arrive back at Jacobi’s office, where someone else would be waiting to talk to him.

“Is it a lot more complicated than that? Lots of detail and difficult-to-understand nuance?”

“I... yes.”

“Will anybody but you understanding any of that nuance do anything to fix things?”

“I don’t know! How can I know that? I might have missed something really important, and then having someone else know...”

“The map from the territory. Fair enough, I get it.”

The terrible thing was, he probably did. Everything Hamblin had seen so far suggested that Jacobi was far and away the smartest guy available, easily the guy you’d want in charge of an emergency response. It was depressing, Hamblin thought, because when everything turned to ash, when all their efforts failed, nobody would be able to say that the best people weren’t on the job.

“So, to recap,” said Jacobi, “sometime last week a... thing...”

“...Genetic activator...”

“...Which looks and behaves like a virus, but isn’t...”

Hamblin didn’t have an interruption, so he just nodded. Jacobi looked momentarily nonplussed.

“...began spreading from person to person, probably starting somewhere in Singapore or Hong Kong, activating a section of human DNA that was previously thought to be so-called ‘junk’ DNA...”

Hamblin made a “more or less” gesture with his head.

“...which flips the metablism into high gear, repairing disease and injury at an astonishing rate and basically making everybody into a marathon runner...”

“...Triathalete, is what gets said most often; the muscle density...”

“...Triathalete, while at the same time making everybody more suggestible and tractile to authority...”

“...only to authority figures who have the modifications...” Another corner, this time Jacobi doing the outside track.

“And there’s the rub, yeah? Otherwise we’d just let it go. World could use better physical fitness and respect for authority, in my opinion.”

“Well,” said Hamblin, who had entertained thoughts along those lines himself, “You could just infect yourself, and then you’d be in charge of...”

“So about that.” Jacobi stopped in front of a big round door and started punching codes into a numeric keypad. “What are they doing different? Hong Kong hasn’t ground to a halt, that I’ve heard, despite an infection rate approaching eighty per cent..”

“Infection is a troubling...”

The door swung open and they walked through it, still at that same fast clip.

“Movement, acquisition, I don’t care what you call it, eighty per cent of the people who live in Hong Kong have it, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So what are they doing?”

“Going to work, largely, though many of them seem to be making... precipitous decisions...”

“Go on.” Behind the door was a huge open space, easily the biggest room Hamblin had ever been in; the floor was perfectly flat, covered in blacktop, while the ceiling arced high overhead. Off to the right the space brightened to a white glare; he got the idea that that was sunlight, that that end of the space was open.

“...Um...”

“Precipitous decisions, you said.” Jacobi led him out onto the blacktop; the air was notably muggy and hot. It felt like Florida, which was weird because he’d entered the cavernous space where Jacobi’s office was by going down an elevator in Colorado.

“There has been a precipitous rise in space-related startups in the past week. Something like twenty-five hundred new companies, all aiming to either produce new types of rockets or mine astroids or...”

“Uh huh.” There were planes parked on the blacktop; a couple of the small corporate-jet types, another large and bulbous-bellied. All of them were painted the neutral color that Hamblin had come to associate with Jacobi’s organization, which had a long, unpronouncable acronym that somehow didn’t stick in the brain at all but had ‘emergency response’ in it somewhere.

“Anything else?”

“They’re all joining martial arts gyms.” He was having to speak louder as the engines on the big bellied cargo jet were firing up. Worryingly, they seemed to be walking toward it.

“So a non-viral genetic replicator is infecting the human population and turning us into space-bound super-warriors, which may or may not be a good thing.”

“Yes, more or less...” They reached the back of the plane and walked up the ramp into the big open cargo area. Jacobi thumbed an intercom button: “We’re aboard,” he said.”

The ramp started to come up and the plane began to taxi as soon as the end of the ramp left the blacktop. Jacobi led him up to the wall that lead, presumably, to the cockpit; there were jumpseats that folded down and had seatbelts. Jacobi showed him how the seatbelts worked.

“Where are we going, Colonel?”

“Hong Kong!”

“Are you out of your...” Hamblin was on the verge of unbuckling his seatbelt and attempting to jump off the moving plane when it suddenly throttled up, then leapt into the air at an angle that left him more or less dangling from the seatbelt, watching the ramp-door close the last crack  down the long tube of the plane’s fuselage.

“Doctor Hamblin, a non-viral genetic replicator is infecting the human population and turning us into space-bound super-warriors! We’re going to do something about it!”

Hamblin fought to press his back against the bulkhead and not throw up.