Chelen City: Chapter Eighteen: Part One

 Notes: Yep, the numbers are right, turns out there's no Chapter 17 Part 2. On to the plotting!

Title: Chelen City: Chapter Eighteen, Part One

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Chapter Eighteen, Part One

 

There was something exciting about analyzing important data. Elanus was well aware that not a lot of people would agree with him on that—there was a reason he enjoyed being a CEO, and a lot of it had to do with data analysis—but in this case it was not only exciting, it was crucial. He’d gotten his algorithms on data from Elfshot infections for the entire population of Chelen City, which was as broad a test population as he was going to get for now, and the results were in on when and where it looked like children were being infected.

“There’s a ninety percent chance that they’re given the mutation that starts the downward spiral at their ten-year physical,” he said, transforming the data into a graph and projecting it to share with Kieron. “You almost never see Elfshot in a child younger than ten, and the dissemination of the virus itself takes a while to get a foothold in the body and take over normal replication, so the disease itself doesn’t present until around twelve.”

“Sneaky,” Kieron commented as he stared at the graph. “And the ten-year physical is the last one required by law to be in person at the doctor’s office?”

“Not just a doctor’s office, the office of the city’s chief medical officer,” Elanus clarified. “Kids are centrally assessed at age three, seven, and ten. After that, the next physical whose data has to be shared is the fifteen year, but those are usually handled by the aptitude officer for whatever schooling route the kid’s been funneled into.”

“Why not just have physicians transmit the information digitally?”

Elanus smirked. “Because this is Gania, and we wouldn’t be Ganian if we didn’t try to cheat the system. Local doctors can be bribed to give elevated results for health and intelligence, but the city CMO is supposed to be above that kind of trickery.” Which they very clearly weren’t, in this case. “I think we should grab the doctor and—”

Kieron shook his head. “Too obvious. Even here on Gania, being a doctor is a highly respected job, one of the least assassinated roles in public service. If you send me after one, you’re not only giving Restaria a warning that you’re onto xer, you’re making yourself into a bad guy in the eyes of the public. No.” He stared at the data one last time, then flipped to a new set of numbers. “Show me how it’s being done?”

“I assume it’s in the Regen injection kids get,” Elanus said, turning the numbers into another visual. “It’s tailored to each individual child and meant to bolster their systems.”

“So each kid is given a shot, or…”

“Nothing so old-fashioned. The doctor inputs their parameters, the kid sits in the autodoc, and the medication is administered via absorption through the skin.”

“Huh.” Kieron crossed his arms. “Is the virus itself replicable from Regen?”

“Yeah.” That was one of the worst parts, how damnably simple the delivery system was. “In the end, it’s all just proteins and foldings. The autodoc is easily capable of formulating the nascent virus and including it in the injection.”

“So there’s got to be some sort of regular subroutine that the physicians are inputting that tells the autodoc what to put in. Some kind of code that reads one thing but actually means Elfshot Disease.”

“There is.” Elanus pulled up another visual. “They call it Vitamin E-3.” It looked like a Vitamin E booster, but the coding was subtly different. “Only kids who end up getting Elfshot get this one.”

“Okay.” Kieron nodded. “But the doctor, whoever it is doing the administering, might not know that.”

Elanus scoffed. “They have to know.”

“Not necessarily. It would be so easy to conceal this kind of thing in paperwork from the kids’ earlier physicals—in fact, the way you people pull every bit of personal information together into a whole, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a trigger flagged by a student’s teacher instead of their doctor. There’s a whole network of wrongdoing here, but we need to know more if we’re going to uproot it successfully.”

Elanus resisted the urge to pull on his hair. “We know who the root is! We need to take out Restaria, then worry about the rest of it.”

“Oh yeah?” Kieron stared up at him challengingly. “So you’re fine with this subroutine being administered for weeks or months while we work through Restaria’s crimes? Because xe’s the vice-fucking-president of the whole planet, Elanus, and like it or not, that means xe’s got a hell of a lot of power and influence over how this is going to go. We can have xer dead to rights on giving potential rivals Elfshot Disease and still get into the kind of legal fight that will have us battling it out in court for a long fucking time.”

Oof, Kieron was feeling strongly about this if he was using “fucking” more than once in five minutes. “So what do you suggest, then?” Elanus asked—not graciously, but he wasn’t outright rude about it either. It was the best he could do, and he could tell Kieron knew that from the way he smiled.

“We need to stop the delivery of the virus, first and foremost. That means writing some sort of code that will intercept the E-3 subroutine and turn it into a regular booster, without letting on that it’s happening.”

“I can do that,” Elanus said. “And it would be simple to get Catie to send it downstream to the medical offices where—”

“No!”

Elanus blinked, startled at Kieron’s fierce denial. “Why not? She could do it, you know she could.”

“We can’t take the chance that another virus will follow her back,” Kieron said, his eyes wide. “Remember last time? You were barely able to help her fight it off, and that was a virus taking largely unknown advantage—this time, Restaria’s been able to prepare, to learn from past mistakes. Let another one of those in here, and you might end up dead instead of just having a stroke. No.”

Ah. Well, when he put it that way…yeah. It was a dumb idea. Elanus had improved the girls’ defensive capabilities since then, but still, it was better not to test it if Kieron had a better idea. “What do you suggest?”

“Maintenance. Send in someone to do some work on the machines, let them get the code into the system, keep it quiet and calm.” Kieron looked back at the holograph. “Who owns the contract for maintenance on those autodocs?”

“I will, as soon as I’ve proxy-purchased it,” Elanus replied.

“You’re sure you can do it without tipping off Restaria?”

“Absolutely positive.”

Kieron smiled. “Then I think we’ve got our first step.”

First step of many. Elanus rubbed his hands together and grinned. This was going to be fun.