Orussian Quarantine Read online

Tales of shrouded history

  Orussian Quarantine

  Rob J Meijer

  Copyright 2015 Rob J Meijer

  This is a FREE e-Book. It is licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike International Licence.

  You are free to copy and share the material in any medium or format. You are free to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercialy. Under the following conditions:

  You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable maner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

  If you remix, transform or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same licence as the original.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Mixed feelings

  Chapter 2: Golden opportunities

  Chapter 3: Preparations

  Chapter 4: Depths

  Chapter 5: Panic

  Chapter 6: Paradise

  Chapter 7: Omega & Alpha

  Chapter 8: Probabilities

  Chapter 9: Complications

  Chapter 10: Duty

  Epilogue

  Chapter 1

  *Mixed feelings*

  "The ultimate challenge to bio-engineering lies in the realization that our ability to create new forms out of old equilibrium inevitably initiates an evolutionary movement away from both the new form and the old equilibrium."

  —Ursang III, level 8 bio-guild master

  After Inoatar had disappeared into the woods, Uriëlla had felt a mixture of loss and of relief. Inoatar had been so much more than a pet. After twelve standard years of solitude in her small Woldera-based science station, this ant-monkey had become an unlikely but true friend. His disappearance into the woods, after Uriëlla had explained to him the full impact of the Lilith incident, proved to her how deep their friendship was. After the reports about the incident reached the small southeast Woldera science station, Uriëlla's relationship with Inoatar had instantly become a cause for serious concern. Concern for her own survival and most of all concern for her family and clan. Ant-monkeys were bio-engineered using and combining the genetic material of Wolderian ants and Maarsolian apes. Ant-monkeys had been bred on Scayune by the bio-guild for the cheap labor they could provide. It all seemed like such a perfect match.

  The Maarsolian apes, in stature almost Orussian childlike, were relatively intelligent and had sufficient intellectual and physical potential for performing non-trivial tasks. They lacked, though, any concept of hierarchy and any structural cooperative interaction beyond their base matriarchal family, pack-hunting cooperation patterns. Adult apes, however, violently rejected any type of authority.

  Wolderian ants on the other hand, although lacking any level of intelligence, were amazingly organized to such an extent that a Wolderian ant nest, with its tens of thousands of worker ants, was not that much different in structure from the ancient patriarchally-organized city-states on Cirus-prime. Wolderian ants were like the cells in an Orussian's body. Every ant knew only how to play its part, but the whole nest functioned almost like a single semi-intelligent organism. When the bio-guild started selling ant-monkey workers to the cities on Uhm, but more importantly to the mining-guild, a golden age seemed to have arrived in the Orus system.

  Inoatar was an ant-monkey male, not a worker, so just like all ant-monkey males, Inoatar's economic value for the guild ended after mating with a queen, usually at an age of somewhat more than one standard year. Males were given away by the guild as pets to highly regarded masters of other guilds and, as in Uriëlla's case, to relatives of Council members if these were sent on solitary missions. Uriëlla, by virtue of having an uncle on the guild’s top council, had received Inoatar as a pet to keep her company on Woldera. While the forest planet Woldera had rich and abundant fauna, the animals on Woldera were all but appealing to average Orussians. So having a companion with more agreeable features than the Wolderian insects, spiders, slugs, snakes and lizards was a prospect that would likely be welcomed by any guild member sent for a standard solitary 15-year mission to a place such as Woldera.

  Uriëlla was privileged in this regard. Males were rare; a male, just like a queen that would produce about a thousand eggs each day for 5 consecutive standard years, mated only once. Ant-monkey mating was quite a spectacle. It involved a single queen and a handful of males. The spectacle would take a few hours and for the male ant-monkey it was not without peril. Inoatar had required quite a bit of medical care in the first few weeks that he was in Uriëlla's possession. Mating injuries could be bad. They were never fatal, but lasting injuries had been reported.

  But now things had changed drastically. The golden age for the Orus system and the privileged position the guild had enjoyed as sole supplier of ant-monkey workers had come to an abrupt end. The Lilith incident changed everything. The Scayune ant-monkey breeding colonies had all been placed in quarantine after the Lilith colony ant-monkey uprising. The guild’s bioengineers had taken all the usual precautions for their ant-monkey genetic meta-architecture. The mythical guild master, Ursang III, the first Bio to ever secure a place in the senate, had been the intellectual father of what had become the power-base for the bio-guild. Regressive Evolution Life Inhibitor (RELI) technology allowed the guild to work around the four laws of equilibrium that would normally have well-designed life forms, within just four or five generations, devolve into a species with dangerously different properties than those initially designed. Ursang III had created the concept of a RELI-gene. A gene that effectively stopped new equilibrium from occurring by crudely stopping evolution itself.

  Potentially dangerous animals like the ant monkey were genetically imprinted to not harm their Orussian masters in any way and to protect them if they perceived any danger. For ant-monkey workers, the natural reverence of Wolderian ants towards their queen had been used as a basis for their Orussian imprints. The designs were created with multiple major vital functions tied to their RELI-gene. So with their imprinted RELI-gene ensuring unquestioning reverence of all their Orussian masters, and with multiple vital functions bound to this RELI-gene ensuring an early death for larvae with a RELI-gene that was in any way mutated, the Scayune incident, where ant-monkeys slaughtered more than two thousand guild members, defied all logic.

  Before the incident, Uriëlla's use of a geno-virus on Inoatar would at worst have gotten her assigned to a level 4 post in South Uhm City Central as next post, rather than the assistant post in the north Uhm city of Ga that her uncle had worked so hard to secure for her. Inoatar was after all just a single and now infertile male on a planet without queens or settlements, and relatives of council members always received the benefit of the doubt in such cases. But after the Scayune incident, the guild council was no doubt frantically looking for a way out of the current quarantine. A level 3 bioengineer that was caught messing with a breeder’s RELI-gene would make Uriëlla a more than perfect scapegoat.

  Seven standard years ago—by that time already having grown extremely fond of Inoatar—Uriëlla had taken a rather bold action that could very well get her into deep trouble if it were now discovered.

  Uriëlla had been around ant-monkeys before during her time on Scayune, but never had she developed any emotional ties to them. When her feelings of friendship towards Inoatar had unexpectedly deepened, Inoatar, like any ant-monkey, could only answer Uriëlla's show of friendship with the unquestioning loyalty and reverence that came from the guild’s patented RELI-gene technology. Ant-monkeys, in order to be able to follow non-trivial work orders, were bioengineered to gain a reasonable understanding of the Orussian language, although most an
t-monkeys only possessed conversational skills not much better than that of a toddler.

  Inoatar, in contrast, had shown amazing conversational skills approximating those of an Orussian adolescent. Next to his language skills, Inoatar had also shown an understanding of engineering that could probably have rivaled that of some of Uriëlla’s less-gifted classmates back in pre-guild who, even though they didn't make it to an apprentice position, included some of Uriëlla's best friends outside the guild. Inoatar was mentally gifted way beyond the basic level of his bioengineered heritage. It was this that made it difficult for Uriëlla to accept Inoatar's bioengineered reverence of her. Inoatar wasn't just a pet, he was a person like her. Not Orussian, no, but still a person. A person, though, as his RELI-gene ensured, without a trace of free will. Uriëlla struggled with the moral implications of this realization for quite some time. Could she allow a person to live a sub-Orussian existence while being held hostage by his RELI-gene in a reality of pseudo-religious slavery? On the other hand, she could not just blatantly ignore the stringent guidelines regarding RELI-safety of bio-engineered animals.

  Inoatar was now sterile, but the four laws of equilibrium left no doubt about the guild’s deeply rooted fear of the dangers of a new natural equilibrium. Her training and logic went directly against her deep feelings of friendship for this extraordinary creature that was more like a son to her than a pet. In the end emotion overcame logic and duty, and Uriëlla engineered a simple, yet effective targeted geno-virus. The virus didn't change the RELI-gene in any way, but simply changed a second gene in such a way that the blind reverence induced by the RELI-gene was effectively removed. Uriëlla was delighted to find that Inoatar, with his new free-will gene activated, accepted her friendship, and after a few years he turned into an almost Orussian companion.

  But now, after the reports of the Lilith incident had reached her, delight had turned into despair. If the free-will gene was discovered, Uriëlla would probably face the most severe punishment known to the guild. Not only would Uriëlla herself face the most lengthy and gruesome death conceivable— her entire clan, even her uncle on the Council, would be expelled from the guild and reduced to the lowest social standing in Orussian society. They would be reduced to non-citizens: dam-dwellers most probably, a fate Uriëlla did not wish upon anyone. So now that Inoatar had disappeared into the endless Woldera woods, while she felt the loss of never seeing her dear friend again, Uriëlla felt relieved. She knew he was skilled enough to survive the Woldera forest, and its vastness combined with its often hostile wildlife made it very unlikely that his free-will gene would ever be discovered by the guild.

  Chapter 2

  *Golden opportunities*

  Gabriëlla had been working really hard to get noticed for quite some time now, but now for the first time, a real opportunity seemed truly within grasp. While she was still only a level 2 member of the medical guild, and while she hated the nasty smell of these creatures, the Lilith incident had made Gabriëlla's post with the mining guild probably the best level 2 post in her entire guild. She now had the opportunity to truly make a name for herself, and if she played her cards right, she may not have to spend the 32 standard-day period that constitutes the southern Uhm high summer wearing a thermo-suit twenty-four-seven. Uhm, or Orus-2 as non-Orussians referred to it, was the only planet in the Orus system that had truly been colonized, but it was also the least pleasant of the four life-supporting planets in the system. Orus-5, or Scayune as Orussians referred to it, the bio-guild's prime breeding planet, also had something approaching a population, but nothing compared to Uhm. South Uhm City was the most densely-populated city on Uhm. Officially it had about one hundred million inhabitants, but those were just the official counts. Only guild members and aspirant guild members from the guild clans were counted as citizens. The medical guild was the only guild that recognized the existence of the non-citizens dwelling in the Great Dam. According to the medical records kept by the guild, there were somewhere between forty and fifty million non-citizens, or Dammons as they were often referred to, living somewhere inside of or even in improvised structures on top of the city dam.

  The Great Dam was a large structure built to dam the artificial south-pole landmass from the south Uhmian sea. It was built to withstand the violently boiling southern sea during high summer. It was never built to house millions of people.

  Thus the living conditions that were present for those millions of dam dwellers who spent most of their lives there created ideal medical training grounds for their lower level members. Gabriëlla was extremely disappointed when she didn't get assigned to a post near the Great Dam. While the big dam was basically an oven, and people living inside it could only hope to survive by continuously wearing thermo suits, at least the Dammons were Orussians. Instead she was assigned to a post at the mining guild, working with those vile-smelling ant-monkeys. The Lilith incident, however, had made her position with the mining guild so much more desirable.

  After the Lilith incident all the Orus-5 breeding plants were quarantined. Nobody knew for how long. Possibly indefinitely. As ant-monkeys had been rather cheap, medical care had not been a top priority for the mining guild until recently. But now that the Scayune ant-monkey production was unavailable to the guild, keeping the existing stock alive and healthy had become priority number one—so much so that Gabriëlla's guild master would need to take some level 2 members with her this summer to handle all the paperwork. Orus-2 was mostly a desert planet. Its proximity to the Orus star made most of the planet too hot for settlement. Only at the poles could settlements exist.

  This meant that while winters in South Uhm City were without sunlight, they were the most bearable season. Summers in South Uhm City were hot. Extremely hot. Especially close to the dam.

  The Uhmian elite either lived far from the dam, close to the ultimate south, or migrated to one of the two north-pole cities for summer. The richest spent their summers in the city of Ga. Others, like her guild master, continued their work on Lot peninsula. If she played her cards right, she would be joining her master when he and the mining guild masters moved to Lot to escape the southern summer season.

  Chapter 3

  *Preparations*

  The atmospheric thinning statistics coming back from Maarsoly were much worse than the climate models had predicted. Orus-4 was dying much faster than expected. Orus-4, or Maarsoly as Orussians referred to it, was a small terra-formed planet where originally-Cirussian fauna had evolved into uniquely Maarsolian reptiles and mammals. The lakes of south Maarsoly had even become the habitat of an oddly exotic aquatic mammal that had recently been qualified as a high-potential pre-civ species.

  The Maarsolian fauna, and especially this pre-civ species, needed to be preserved. Climate science was still in its infancy when Maarsoly was terra-formed. The planet turned out to be fundamentally too small to sustain a type B atmosphere. Generations of climate scientists had used every trick in the book to slow the thinning of the atmosphere, but now a critical threshold had been reached and thinning was accelerating. The planet was losing its atmosphere, there were no terra-plants close enough for a new type-B atmosphere injection, thus the only way to save most of the planet’s rich fauna would be bio-migration.

  Uriëlla and Inoatar had forty standard days left until the climate engineer that was to be seconded to her station would arrive. Uriëlla had gathered the genetic material of the over three thousand species unique to her quadrant of the forest planet. The whole southeastern sub-tropic was to be turned into Maarsolian grasslands. Grasslands on Orus-3! And after the bio migration, those grassland would house mammals. Mammals! A welcome thought after fourteen standard years on the forest planet inhabited mostly by insects and slimy slugs.

  A lot had happened since the Lilith incident. The guild’s master bioscientists had discovered the problem that had led to the Lilith uprising. There was a major and fundamental flaw in the RELI-gene that allowed slight non-fatal mutations to it to trigger a dyna
mic re-imprint from Orussians back to the original Maarsolian ant queen reverence. The Lilith workers had re-imprinted on their queen mother, and had at one point perceived all Orussians as posing a threat to their queen goddess. Scientists were working hard on a fix for the RELI-gene, but until one was found, ant-monkey queens were strictly prohibited. Each of the forty queens on Scayune had been ordered to be incinerated by the Interstellar Senate.

  For Uriëlla this meant that she could welcome Inoatar back without any worries. Last spring Inoatar had run into one of the many signs she had left at each of the deep forest checkpoints. Consequently he had returned to the science station, where Uriëlla had welcomed him back. The preparations for the biomigration gave Inoatar a great opportunity to put his engineering skills to good use.

  Incubation and Relocation Capsules (IRCs) were normally build on Cirus-prime, but Cirus was a good 6 standard light-years from Orus. This meant Cirussian capsules could not reach the planet in time. Uriëlla had to design and build IRCs from spare parts. Inoatar had picked up pretty quickly on Uriëlla's IRC design. The speed with which Inoatar was able to build new IRCs and his ability to come up with minor design modifications when he ran out of a specific part continuously amazed Uriëlla. A good thing too, as major climate engineering efforts were to start in 120 standard days, so time was short.

  Raphaël’s accommodations were almost finished. Although the big problems Uriëlla had expected with respect to her use of the geno-virus were no longer to be feared, there were still critical issues when it came to how Raphaël might react. It was clear from Inoatar’s behavior that his RELI-gene was inactive. Raphaël might report this, but with all queens dead, it was very unlikely there would any significant consequences to either her or Inoatar. The real issue was that Uriëlla and Raphaël would need to work together for quite a long time. If Raphaël had issues with Inoatar’s existence, how could they work together effectively? There was so much work to do in so little time. A planet was dying, and without their intervention, many, many thousands of unique and valuable species. Uriëlla and Raphaël had to work as a team from day one. Inoatar was Uriëlla's true friend and was indispensable as an IRC builder in these times of crises. They would need to finish all the IRCs before Raphaël arrived. Inoatar had to once again disappear into the woods. It pained her, but once again there was too much at stake.