Double Helix Ch. 19

Norm came over to stand by her immediately. Despite his misgivings, he had agreed to throw his whole support behind Nonna's plan. Tilly and I went up at almost the same time. Nissi snapped herself out of her shock at seeing Nonna's recovery, and joined us. Stan and Stansy bent close to one another, exchanged a few quiet words, and then came up together. Wendy seemed to be in shock, but after Stan and Stansy came up, she followed right after.

Alice was next, though I understood her hesitation, having children to care for. "You helped me and mine when we needed it. I'll stand with you," she said, speaking to Norm. Gena moved to the table and set down her coffee. I watched Norm's jaw tighten as she crossed the floor to stand with our growing group. That left Stanford, Stanley, Ed, and Dawn. The latter three, who comprised Tilly's research team, clustered together, leaning close to talk in whispers. I couldn't help overhearing them.

"What do you think?" Ed said. "I didn't come here for this, and I don't know how much use I'll be. I really am just a farmer."

"And this is The Farm," Stanley said, clapping him on the shoulder. "If anyone can pull something like this off, it's these people, but you guys can do what you want."

"Come on, Ed," Dawn said, and pointed at Wendy. "If that little girl thinks she can help, so can you. So can all of us."

Ed looked over at Wendy sheepishly. "You do have a point. Alright, I'm in."

The three of them walked forward to stand with the rest of us.

Stanford looked rather uncomfortable at being the last one standing on the other side of the room. "I'm not much of a fighter," he offered.

"As I said," Nonna restated, "no one is compelled to join. There is no need to be ashamed."

He frowned in thought. "And what happens to me if I stay behind and this whole thing goes tits up?"

"Oh," I said. "You'll have maybe an hour before the feds converge on this place. You could probably get away in time and go somewhere. That's if we can get warning to you."

"Great," he chuckled. "Just great. Second day here." He walked over to our side of the room. "You probably don't want me on the front lines, but for whatever I can do to ensure the ultimate success of this venture, I am at your disposal."

"Excellent," Nonna said, waving everyone back to their seats. "We will have daily meetings each morning to keep you all updated on our status. I realize that Norm is your de facto leader, but he has agreed for the purposes of this operation that he will be my executive officer. We will bring in the rest of you as needed for your expertise in planning and executing this rescue, and I cannot guarantee that we will make use of all of you, even if you feel that you have valuable insight to offer. The needs of the group come before your own egos. Dismissed."

Nonna went into the kitchen and Nissi hurried to intercept her. I could see the wonder and excitement in the elf's eyes. Like most of us, she must have begun to lose hope that Nonna would ever recover. I followed after, and got there just as Stan and Stansy arrived. Nonna was pouring herself a cup of coffee as Nissi hit her with a barrage of questions. "When did this happen? What can you remember? Have you noticed any side effects?"

"Last night. Bits and pieces. And I'm fine," Nona answered. Then realization gleamed in her eyes. "You were the one who did this, weren't you? I remember talking to you about my disease." Her forehead scrunched up. "I remember lying on a table while you worked over me. I was cold."

"Yes," that's good," Nissi said. "We anticipated that some of your memory loss would be permanent, but you may regain some with time. How do you feel, physically?"

"I feel strong. I went for a run this morning, to push myself. I barely remembered what it was like just to run. My mind, too, races with new possibilities. I possess both the experience of the aged and the vitality of youth. What you have done for me is a precious gift."

"It was..." Nissi began, for a moment at a loss for words. "I'm just happy that I was able to help. The team is going to be thrilled with this development. This treatment could help millions of people."

"Our funding is going to go through the roof," I said. "If you publish your results to the darknet, you're going to have thousands more rolling in by this time next week, maybe even millions eventually. I would put up some video of her for maximum effect."

"Millions, you say?" Nonna said with a somewhat predatory grin. "And is this money earmarked? Or can we use it at our discretion?"

"Well," Nissi said, frowning uncertainly. "Tilly could probably use some of it to fund her research, and to help start her fish farming project. And I can think of some upgrades we might make to our facilities and equipment, especially if we plan to treat more human subjects."

"No, you do not understand-" Nonna began.

"I get it," I interrupted, laughing. "You're thinking this money could help us in this operation you are planning."

"Oh, I see," Nissi said. She looked thoughtful for a moment. "I suppose if we are upfront with our donors that a portion of their money will be spent on, uh, staffing and administrative costs."

Nonna patted her shoulder. "That's the spirit."

Norm got in touch with Mike later than day, but didn't want to discuss any details over the phone. Instead, he got Mike to agree to meeting at a remote location north of Corvallis in a few days.

Nonna evaluated each of us on our skillset, starting with marksmanship. I was first up. I put the rifle up to my shoulders and easily placed all five rounds from my M40 rifle into a space barely larger than the diameter of the bullets from a distance of 200 meters. At that short a range, it felt like cheating. I could almost make those shots without the scope.

"Excellent," Nonna said. "Not many could do that without a bipod and lots more prep. You certainly have a knack for this. May I see your weapon?"

I carefully passed her the rifle after checking that the chamber and magazine were clear. She went to work and rendered it into its component pieces with a screwdriver in less than a minute, setting them down on a white cloth lying in front of her on the ground. Looking over the pieces, she clucked her tongue. "Unacceptable. You have allowed grime to build up in the barrel and receiver and have not lubricated your weapon in some time. Do you even have a cleaning kit?"

Now that she had mentioned it, Norm had provided me with a kit that had some little bottles, bits of cloth, and a long rod. "Uh, I think so."

"Bah!" she said. "Go get it and come back." I started walking and she called after me, "Run!"

I hurried back with the plastic box, after verifying that it was labeled as a gun cleaning kit. Nonna patiently explained what she was doing as she passed the rod with cleaning patches attached through the barrel over and over, going from the muzzle to the receiver. "If you do not keep the barrel clean and the action lubricated, you increase the likelihood of a jam. You must clean and lubricate your weapon after each use. No exceptions."

She reassembled my rifle and handed it back to me. "Do you have a backup weapon? A pistol or a submachine gun?"

"No," I said. "Money was tight and I didn't think I needed one."

"Here," she said, unloading and handing over her Makarov. "I want to see how well you do with a handgun at 50 meters."

She evaluated everyone else on their ability with both rifle and pistol shooting, as well as Tilly with the shotgun she favored. Wendy's performance was mediocre. She had not trained regularly with the rest of us, though she had at least studied up on gun safety so that she would know how to properly handle a weapon. Alice fared better, especially with rifle shooting, and Nonna assured her that with a bit of practice she would be a solid member of the team.

Unsurprisingly, most of the new recruits did poorly, with the exception of Stanley, who shot nearly as well as Stan. Dawn squeaked the first time she fired a pistol and felt it jump in her hand, and developed a terrible flinch that Nonna immediately stepped in to rectify. It took Nonna several minutes of haranguing, even making jabs at his masculinity, to get Stanford to even touch a gun, and he did little better than Dawn once he actually tried to shoot.

"We have time," Nonna said. "After a few weeks, most of you will be able to put your fire consistently on target. We will procure weapons for everyone soon, and I want each of you to be confident in shooting both pistols and rifles. Each has their uses, and we want to be as flexible as possible to respond to changing conditions. No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy."

We broke for lunch, and when we returned to the firing range, Nonna began teaching us small unit tactics, explaining the grouping of fire teams and squads, what different commands meant and the various formations that could be formed from them. We drilled endlessly on these, marching back and forth along the range. No one carried guns for these drills. Instead, Nonna had found various items from the barn to stand in for gear, and loaded all of us down to approximate what it would feel like to wear body armor and carry weapons.

Nonna didn't stop for a break until the sun was far into the western sky. Naturally, some of us fared better than others. The four Stans were sweaty and moving a bit more slowly as we gathered into little groups to head back, but all of the other genemods and humans looked fatigued, and a few seemed to be dead on their feet. I saw Nissi carrying a burden and realized that she had Wendy. The girl's head lay limply on her shoulder, her arms wrapped around the neck of the elf woman.

"Hey, is she okay?" I asked as I trotted up to them. Like the Stans, I wasn't much the worse for wear. I shared their greater lung capacity, metabolic efficiency and enhanced musculature. Our bodies didn't need exercise to stay in top condition, so our bodies functioned like top athletes. I could see that the intense exercise had taken its toll on Nissi. Elves were physically enhanced, but their willowy figure was a constraint on their overall fitness. "Want me to take her?" I offered.

Nissi looked at me wearily and nodded. I scooped Wendy up in a cradling carry. "Hey, Nock," she said. "Is this the only way you can manage to sweep a girl off her feet?"

"Looks like it's working," I said. "You look ready to swoon."

Wendy chuckled at that and then went silent. After a bit, I thought she had started laughing again, but when I looked down, I saw that there were tears on her face. "Did you get hurt?" I asked, suddenly concerned.

She shook her head slightly and answered with a sob. "N-no. I'm just fucking useless."

"Wendy," I said chidingly. "You almost killed yourself today. Why didn't you talk to Nonna?"

She hiccuped and used the back of a hand to wipe the moisture from her face. "I did, when she pulled me aside and told me that I could take the rest of the afternoon off. I told her I was fine." Her face clouded over. "But I'm not. I'm awful. If I were born normal, I'd be a little younger than Alice, and she's doing okay. Why the hell did my parents do this to me?"

I knew what Norm or Nissi, or probably even what Stan would say. They would tell her that her parents had just wanted her to be happy, and that it may have been misguided, but they had her best interests at heart. I didn't put stock in such pretty lies. "They were selfish," I said. "And you have every right to be angry about it."

Wendy went silent for a minute. "We aren't supposed to hate our parents," she said, and sighed. "And I don't, not really. I even think they realized, as they started to get older, that there are a lot of good reasons to want to let your children grow up. They're both over seventy. I think they would have liked to have grandchildren."

I didn't know what to say about that, so I just carried her in silence for a minute. The lights came on up ahead at the house. The Stans had run on ahead to get dinner started for all of us, and it was a welcoming sight. "You don't have to be on the front line," I said. "I doubt Nonna wants everyone in the assault. The rest of us will be needed for supporting roles."

"Not you," she said. "You'll be the hammer of God, killing people from a mile away."

"That's an exaggeration," I said. "Half a mile."

Wendy chuckled. "Whatever. I'll probably be doing something lame like monitoring comms."

"Yeah, that would suck," I agreed. "Who needs all that technology and coordination? Seriously, though, I don't think Nonna's going to let you back out there to train. I think the only reason she did it today was to let everyone appreciate how hard this is going to be. I'm pretty sure Dawn is off the team, and maybe Ed, too." I almost said the same of Gena, but though she hadn't done much better at keeping up, she had persisted in staying at it when the other two had asked for a rest.

"Why don't you put me down now?" she said. We were nearly to the driveway, and she wobbled for a second when I set her on her feet. "I'm fine," she said, "just tired and sore."

"Okay," I said, and let her walk on ahead, though she was clearly in pain.

Gena showed up in the den again after dinner. "Hey, I saw you carrying Wendy," she said. "And she just went straight to bed. Is she alright?"

"I think so," I answered. "She overworked herself, is all. She'll be fine. Speaking of which, you've been dead on your feet most of the day. Did you pull an all-nighter?"

Gena grimaced. "Yeah, not intentionally. Stan told me I should go to bed before he headed back here for the night, but I told him I just needed a few more minutes to work something out. Next thing I knew, it was four in the morning. At that point, I didn't think I would get any benefit from a couple of hours, so I kept at it until breakfast."

I chuckled. "I feel like I'm having the same conversation I just had with Wendy. Overdoing it isn't going to work in the long term. You'll burn out."

"I know that, but it's just so frustrating. I'm not sure how to explain it. Before I was reverted, it was like I just had to think of what I wanted and my brain would throw out the answer. If I wanted to write a piece of software, I would imagine what it would need to do, and then just start typing, like it was all already written in my head and just needed to come out. Now, when I try that, I work for a bit and then get to a point where I realize I screwed up somewhere in the conception and I almost have to start completely over. I wasted half the day yesterday on that crap and felt like I barely got anything done."

Her mouth had settled into a cute little pout as she finished, and I had to suppress a laugh that probably would have pissed her off. I thought about her predicament for a moment as she brought a chair over to sit next to me behind the desk. "So let me ask you this. Let's say you went for that desktop support job back when you were a super-smart Gena. What would you have done differently?"

The idea seemed to amuse her. She rolled her eyes. "Well, super-smart me obviously would never have applied for that job, but if she did, she wouldn't have bothered studying training manuals for hours on end. She would have probably studied the software itself, figured out how everything worked, and then been as much an expert as the people who wrote it." She stopped. "Oh, I think I see what you mean." She sighed. "So I need training wheels now."

"Don't be so hard on yourself," I said. "What I mean is that you need different tools now. Maybe instead of coding the thing from start to finish, you need to map things out first. Like a blueprint to follow."

She groaned. "Ugh, documentation. I hated having to do that. I always did it after the fact, to help the normies understand what I had done."

"Is that a bit of snobbery I detect?" I teased.

She sighed. "Okay, yeah, a little. I guess I'm the normie now."

"I think that the problem isn't that you aren't smart enough to figure out how to build it," I said, "but that you can't hold everything in your head at once. If you document it, like you say, then you can find where your mental model has gaps, and you can tackle the problem a bit at a time instead of all at once."

"I suppose that's a better strategy than not sleeping. I already decided I'm going to keep working on it in the evenings and for an hour in the morning. I don't think the Stans are going to be taking a break from it completely, so I shouldn't either."

"Alright, but just remember-"

"-don't overwork yourself," she finished together with me. We shared a laugh.

"Right. I have a feeling that Nonna is just going to make things harder for us in the coming weeks. Now, if you don't mind, I've got some email to look through."

"You said you solve break/fix stuff?" she asked. "Mind if I have a look at it with you?"

I shrugged. "I don't care." I pulled up the first of about thirty requests and began to read through it.

"Oh, I think I know what the problem there is," Gena said.

It was a common issue that I saw at least twice a day, but I asked, "What would that be?"

"I think they got the latest kernel update on their terminal, but had a problem installing the new network driver that goes with it. The darknet has very strict requirements about not mixing old and new software, which happens a lot, I'm sure. You probably have a script you can send that will run the install they need."

"Very good," I said.

"That was easy. What else you got?"

We ran through the rest of the emails in about an hour. Gena had a more thorough knowledge of the darknet's architecture and protocols than I did, and managed to come up with a solution for two problems that I would ordinarily have sent on to Stan. "You've really studied how this thing works," I said.

"I did what I could. I didn't have access to the source code, but I deduced a lot from reading the logs it generates."

"Don't tell Norm that," I said. "He'll probably flip out again about you knowing too much."

"Do you think he'll ever come around?" she asked. "It doesn't seem like he's mad at you anymore."

"Too much going on for him to stay mad. You know, I think the problem with Norm is, he blamed himself for trusting you. Now he has to trust you, and that screws with his head. I think, deep down, he still cares about you."

Gena sighed. "I don't know. We were never that close growing up."

"He was envious of you," I said. It was a guess, but it seemed like the right one.

"Yes. And there was nothing I could do about that. I tried, and he wasn't cruel about it, understand. He mostly just avoided me."

"Which is what he's doing now, isn't he?"

She nodded. "Doesn't speak to me, barely looks at me."

"Want me to kick his ass for you?"

Gena laughed, and it was a good thing to hear. "No, of course not." She looked pensive for a moment. "Look, there's something I need to get off my chest. I was going to bring it up sooner, but with all that stuff with my brother, I didn't think it was a good time."

I nodded. "Go on."

She sighed and began to twist a lock of her hair around her finger. "I was following Nonna's case, and I realized that if they could regrow the neurons that she lost to her disease, it should be possible to do the same thing for me. I could be superintelligent again."

I sat back, regarding her. "Do you mean to tell me that this was the real reason you decided to come here?"

She bit her lip and nodded. "Not all of it, but I don't think I would have applied. You think that's selfish, don't you?"

"Gena, you don't know if that's even possible. For Nonna, Nissi had clinical data to draw upon. There's no reason to think that what worked for a normal human brain would fix what they did to you."