Chelen City: Chapter Fourteen, Part One

 Notes: Dun dun DUUUUUN!!! Plot ahoy!

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Fourteen, Part One

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Chapter Fourteen, Part One

 

There was something humbling about returning to work.

Not that Elanus wasn’t always working. He was, in some form or another, whether it was the sort of social networking that came with his position in society or tinkering with algorithms for Catie and Lizzie, he always had something, usually multiple somethings, going on in his mind and at his fingertips. This, though…

Coming up with a cure for Elfshot Disease was the sort of work that Elanus had hoped to accomplish when he first got started in his career. Something that truly benefitted all society, something transformative that would also be of great benefit to him. Something with no downside. Elfshot Disease had been the earliest target that Elanus had set his sights on, and then…

He’d gotten stalled out. When he stalled, he liked to tinker, and tinkering had let him down an entirely new avenue of discovery, which led him to passing his biological research on to Deysan—who was far better equipped for it, Elanus had consoled himself—and continuing into ship mechanics and design. That pursuit had lasted for twenty years of his life, until he finally created the ultimate in AI—a sentient ship, a truly thinking and learning AI intelligence, the birth of a whole new species. At first he had been triumphant, and then after Catie’s kidnapping he’d become terribly, genuinely afraid of what he’d done.

Who was he to engineer an entire race? Who was he to make tender new minds and sell them off to the highest bidder? Sell them to people who would reverse engineer them to see how he’d done it, literally take their baby minds apart connection by connection, then make their own versions? He couldn’t do it. Someone else might come up with the method on their own someday, but until that happened, people were going to have to be satisfied with the normal, everyday superships they had, because Elanus wasn’t going to become the father of a new form of slavery.

All of this to say that it felt, well, right to be coming full circle once more. He was still afflicted with Elfshot Disease—Deysan had never cured it, for all his bluster, and Elanus genuinely didn’t care what he might have fiddled around with in the interim. Whatever that old bastard had been capable of, Elanus was going to get there a hundred times faster thanks to his girls.

He’d start with some statistics. Basic population numbers were always a good spot to build out from.

“Ladies.” Elanus steepled his hands and waited for the girls to stop playing—or at least, stop focusing all their attention on playing, he wasn’t a monster.

[Yes, Daddeee?]

[Yes, Elanus?]

“Are you ready to help me with a new project?”

[The one Kee talked to you about?] Lizzie sounded excited.

[The boooring one?] Catie was decidedly less excited.

Eh, he could work with that. “The Elfshot one,” he said. “I need the latest population numbers for Gania in total, for those who have Elfshot Disease, and…historical data back to the founding of the planet.”

[At what intervals?]

“Every decade should be acceptable.”

[Okay!]

There was silence for a moment, then a series of files popped up in his tab. Elanus sat back, relaxed, and let himself dive into the data he was presented with. Elfshot…present in the population since the beginning, but the numbers were much smaller then…hmm, familial data did suggest that a plague early on compounded by the decimation of their medical facilities meant the disease spread through a few key carriers, but…all the way up to three percent in the span of under a hundred years? Strange…and then to stabilize there, when people with the disease were already self-selecting out of procreating or undergoing genetic testing to prevent the condition from being passed on.

“Overlay socioeconomic data for the afflicted populations.”

Mkay, that was interesting. All levels of society were touched by Elfshot Disease, but it had been much more even-handed in the beginning. As they became more stratified, things began to change…such that more people in the upper class came down with the disease. That was just weird. Either there was something going on with a subset of the population belief-wise that prevented them from seeking preemptive treatment, or…

Huh.

Wait.

No familial connection found. It was only in a few cases, but that was enough to be a red flag for the data. Elfshot was a genetic disease, not an environmental one. It didn’t just show up out of nowhere, and those afflicted were limited to Gania, not other Federation planets where information like this was readily available. Just in case, though…

“Do a search among a random sample of ten other Federation planets for a similar disease.” Maybe it had a different name elsewhere, maybe—

Nope, nothing. By in large, Regen did its job beautifully. The only people who got sick on a regular basis in Federation space were naturals, genetic outliers who couldn’t handle Regen treatments. Elanus spared a moment to be grateful that he wasn’t one of those poor souls.

“Key facts about individuals with no familial connection.”

Oh. Oh, shit, these were not your everyday, ordinary Ganians. These were movers and shakers, people who had clawed their way into the upper echelons of this planet’s society.

“At what age did they show signs of the disease?”

The onset of puberty…later than most cases, although not statistically abnormal.

This was so strange. Stranger still was the way that these statistics were not hard to discover. The public health programs they had in place should have been flagging these findings for further study decades, if not a century ago.

Elanus was struck by a cold thought. “Investigate my personal history for the origin of Elfshot.”

[It says your daddeee had the diseeeease.]

“But I never knew my father, he and my mother died shortly after I was born. Go deeper into the data, see if you can track down who before him had it and when that notation was added to his personal records.”

[Elfshot is found in your father’s line for seven generations,] Lizzie said, but she sounded tentative. [Always manifesting late.]

[But Daddeee…] Catie made a disgruntled sound. [All the notations were aaadded to their files aaat the same time, thirty years ago!]

Thirty years ago. When Elanus was ten, and brilliant for his age group, and going places fast. Everyone said so. He’d gotten such a big head about it…then crashed hard when he found out he had Elfshot Disease by breaking a rib while playing with friends.

He’d have to do more research to make sure he was on the right track, but so far…

So far it looked a hell of a lot like people were being given Elfshot Disease deliberately.