Book Five, Chapter 41: Mutagen 6

We lost track of Bobby and the surrogates as they fled the superbugs, but I knew where Bobby was going. Occasionally, as we followed slowly behind, we would come across one of the mutant bedbugs, and either Dina or I would have to squash it with our feet.

If one came up that was too big to handle, we could always call for Antoine.

Bobby had managed to get the surrogates into his hiding spot at the dispensary.

Dina and I found a communication relay and listened as IBECS fed us their conversation upon request. That kind of convenience was only possible because I had run through all the conversation trees we needed to have to get to that point.

“You tell us what’s going on out here right now,” Michael said in a threatening manner to Bobby.

Bobby took a moment to think through his lines. I wondered if Carousel was giving him lines on the script based on the story we made up or if he had to come up with them wholesale—and if that was the case, what was on the script?

“I didn’t do anything,” Bobby said. “It was you—all you scabs and KRSL. I had a grant from the government, alright? I was sent here to find a way to feed starving people in space. I did not do this. I was promised this would be a contaminant-free ship and that their onboarding methods were 100% foolproof at detecting and eliminating pests. I should have known everything they promised was a lie.”

There was a pause while the surrogates took in what he was saying.

“One of you tracked a bedbug onto the ship,” Bobby said. “They’ve been feeding and multiplying for a year and a half. And about four months ago, the bedbugs finally made it into my lab. At first, they just fed on me, but then they found my livestock. And after they found them, the bugs weren’t so interested in me.”

“Livestock?” Andrew asked. “Are you talking about the protein lab?”

“The same,” Bobby answered. “My livestock are humanely grown from embryo to never suffer and to be the ideal candidates for my experiments.”

“What experiments?” Michael asked incredulously.

“Mutagen 6,” Bobby said. “I’m one of the few who is licensed to experiment with it.”

I was curious to know how they were going to respond. There was no such thing as Mutagen 6 on IBECS—not until Bobby said there was, at least.

“Mutagen 6? Are you kidding me?” Andrew asked.

“It’s a safe variant,” Bobby answered, “designed to grow food faster and more of it on less supply. I can grow a full herd of beef on nothing but algae in a month and a half, just with a little tweak of genetics and chemistry. It’s perfectly legal and safe.”

“Legal?” Andrew said. “It’s legal in that you’re allowed to experiment with it in outer space, but not back in Carousel, where it could get into the ecosystem and start altering living creatures.”

“That’s propaganda,” Bobby said. “All it does is make the creatures grow and make them resilient to any number of diseases. Or at least, that’s all I thought it did.”

There was a pause.

“The bedbugs,” Andrew said.

“The bedbugs,” Bobby answered. “The pure Mutagen 6 ran through the bloodstreams of those animals at levels we had never experimented with back in Carousel. Once they started feeding on the cattle and the goats, they weren’t so interested in humans anymore. They were hooked.”

“What are we talking about here?” Michael asked. “Are they on steroids or something? Because the things I saw… I don’t really understand. One of those things had human teeth.”

“Not human,” Bobby said. “I believe those were from a cow. No matter. Yes, the mutagen created some offspring of the bedbugs with genetic features of the creatures they fed on.”

“I don’t understand,” Andrew said. “Once those things started to spread, why did IBECS not register them and take care of them?”

“I don’t understand it either,” Bobby said. “I do know that these old AIs are usually mishandled and given protocols that make it difficult for them to overcome circumstances their programmers didn’t foresee.”

“Yes, I’ve heard the same,” Andrew said. “Makes you wonder why you’d want an AI if you were going to take away its ability for creative thinking. What do you suppose is preventing it from triggering its defensive protocols?”

“My first thought,” Bobby said, “was that it whitelisted the animals inside my lab. Or, at the very least, it was told to whitelist them. But then, how would the AI confuse these monsters with cows? No, there’s something deeply wrong with its programming. I’ve spoken to IBECS—it doesn’t even seem to register there’s an infestation.”

“It never mentioned anything about it to us,” Andrew said. “If it is somehow unable to even communicate about this particular problem, perhaps it has no protocol for a mutated pest.”

“Whatever the case,” Bobby said, “if we can find a way to initiate its defensive protocols, we may actually be able to get out of this ship before we run out of gas.”

“What do you mean, ‘run out of gas’?” Lila asked, speaking up for the first time.

“Don’t you know?” Bobby replied. “These things—they’re notoriously fuel inefficient. We’re supposed to fuel up soon, and if there’s no one at the helm to override and make sure it happens manually, well… we’re going to be spending the rest of our lives together.”

I grouped back up with Antoine, Kimberly, and Cassie.

“It sounds like Bobby’s doing a good job of getting them motivated to get to the helm,” I said.

“Are we sure there aren’t gonna be any more puzzles?” Kimberly asked.

I shrugged. “There might be puzzles,” I said, “but the real focus will be on the monsters.”

That was one way to solve the puzzle: replace it with a giant mutated bedbug. There was always going to be conflict in a story, but through improvisation, you can choose the conflict—and we chose a fight with mutant pests. That was the magic of reruns. You could learn enough about a story to learn how it ticked and then change things up a bit. Sure, we would be docked points for sidestepping the themes, but hey, at least we were getting somewhere.

Now, when the surrogates had to move forward in the ship, their struggle wouldn’t be against a mind-numbing puzzle that we had to explain to them. It would simply be a fight—one we could help them with without appearing On-Screen.

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We just had to make sure they didn’t end up as bedbug food—well, more than they already were.

Our plan was working flawlessly. Instead of throwing a bunch of random puzzles at us to solve, Carousel was sending waves of monsters to be run from or fought by Bobby and the surrogates—with help from some Off-Screen characters whose names would not appear in the credits.

It was a strange feeling, being happy when a corridor was filled with giant bugs instead of space lasers we had to rearrange.

Slowly, they moved their way forward in the ship, with us dancing around them in the shadows, staying Off-Screen and helping where we could.

Just as we planned, they arrived at the secondary sleeping bay just in time for Second Blood. We had anticipated all the drama that the surrogates would bring to fill out the movie and timed everything just right.

I had no idea what Carousel would do with our little mutant bedbug plan. I got the sense that it was having a little fun.

In the story we were telling, the bedbugs had been created when ordinary insects consumed something called Mutagen 6, but in real life, they were modified clones.

We had no control over mutation—just a fancy alien computer.

Carousel, however, had no such limitations.

“This is it,” Bobby said. “I wasn’t able to get here on my own when I first got out of my lab, I was running for my life. My friend is supposed to be in here.”

Bobby’s nameless friend was an important character in our version of the story.

Now, all he had to do was pick a deep sleep chamber—any deep sleep chamber.

They opened the door to the secondary sleeping bay.

“This room is having the same problem with the lights,” Michael noted.

Those darn lights just wouldn’t stay on.

Bobby had a flashlight he had picked up from his workshop, and he was shining it around at the mounds of normal bedbugs as well as a bunch of hatched eggs—way more eggs than I had put in there.

Strangely, there were tons of dead mutant bedbugs—dozens of them, killed through some form of physical damage that was too desiccated for me to recognize from the distance I was watching.