Fic: Prophylaxis
Jan. 18th, 2019 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beekeeperofedenFic: Prophylaxis
Wordcount: 1405
Summary: Vierna wonders sometimes if the flaws of the old jumpships have fallen wholly out of human memory; Jarlaxle would know, perhaps, but she daren't turn his mind to the question if it isn't already there.
[Warnings for canon-typical drow sexism.]
It is a warning known to every every cosmonaut—when you sail the stars and go through a wormhole, you are forever changed.
Forever lasts until the next wormhole.
Before long, humans had developed better travel, faster travel, that didn't require them to send their sailors through rips in the fabric of reality. But the old wormhole-jumpers had never been mothballed, and there were still a few ships out there with the capability, with old engines that can't run along the stars but can skip right through them.
But the old ships grew rarer and rarer as human captains became skittish about their fatal flaw:
When you go through a wormhole, reality reverses itself. You reverse yourself. You come through backwards, down the molecular structure. Your DNA goes widdershins in your blood, and your proteins flip symmetry. You went in right-handed, and you come out right-handed still—but you return to a universe of lefties.
When the body digests malformed proteins—prions—it fails to understand them, then tries to incorporate this failure into its entire being. Men have died with seafoam on their lips and whalesongs in their head trying to bring the universe into a body not ready for it.
After you go through a wormhole, the entire universe becomes incomprehensible, a file your body can't read. All food becomes poison, unless it's gone through the wormhole with you, been translated into protein that is compatible with your new hardware.
And then you go through another wormhole, and the sinister universe rights itself.
To compensate, most pre-faster-than-light fleets had rules about never stopping after an odd wormhole. Battle maps and trade routes went by the rules of two by two by two. Sailors followed this guide for centuries, for so long that, even today, many space captains with faster-than-light engines still take a short break during their journey, long enough to pause the ship, to study a nebula, to wait—what they're waiting for, they don't know.
Some of the older fleets, of course, still use wormhole technology. The universe does not throw away a tool that works. Evolution does not invent so much as it recycles—vestigial traits linger, are given new purpose, until they become necessary again.
The drow fleets, for example, depend on wormhole jumping. They could switch over to faster-than-light—even galactic sanctions are not so powerful as to keep them limited to obsolete spaceflight—but the matriarchs find it a useful tether on their ship-captains. Two by two by two, they say. Two by two by two is eight, and our lady abhors odd numbers. Oddity is for heretics.
Heresy is punishable by death, and death conveniently applies itself to any captains (and their crews) who may have ventured off the carefully cultivated map. The drow matriarchs, every one trained in genetics and bioenegineering, must surely know the real cause of the Death of the Heretic, but they find it more convenient to hide that fact.
They have built control into their sons' blood, carved obedience into their bones. But power held loosely is apt to slip out of grasp, and tools, however crude, should not be simply abandoned. Not when they work.
In a shielded bubble, hidden in the shadow of a crater on the scarred surface of Lloth's eighth moon, Vierna the houseless, formerly of House Do'Urden, frowned at a microscope and studied her brother's blood.
"This is the only sample?" she asked. She didn't look at Jarlaxle. If she looked at him, she would be able to tell that he was lying. If she caught him lying, she would have to do something about it.
Better not to know. If she were of House Baenre or Del'Armgo or even Mizzrym, she could send soldiers or spies to search his base and confiscate any material. But it's just her. She has no soldiers, no spies. His base is also her base, her laboratory and home.
By not asking, she may have made it easier for him to commit blasphemy, but she couldn't solve that right now.
Later, she promised herself. When she's redeemed herself and her name to the great houses, she will have the power to undo whatever damage she has allowed Jarlaxle to do.
"Of course." He perched on a counter, boot heels kicking against the cupboard doors. He could have been a coddled child sitting on a kitchen counter, not in a bioengineering laboratory with rigid expectations for safety and protocol.
Vierna reminded herself that she couldn't just kick him out or tell him to get his ass off the counters. It was, technically speaking, Jarlaxle's lab.
Why was he still here? Vierna squinted at the blood, barely seeing it.
He wouldn't ask what she had found, surely. That would be too bold, even for him. So, she told herself--he was lingering in hopes that she might let some information slip. He would be looking for the same thing she was, no doubt—the key to her brother's survival away from Menzoberranzan's atmosphere—but all of his researchers were male. Even if they had the training to know what they were looking at, they wouldn't be as good. He needed a real bioengineer to tell him what there was—he needed Vierna.
She smirked.
"Get off the counter."
He swung his boots up onto the opposing counter instead, ignoring how it made the glassware clink. Vierna felt her smirk fade.
"Dinin told me you haven't allowed anyone into the lab for months. I thought that surely you would appreciate the company."
"Dinin may appreciate your company." Far too much, by Vierna's reckoning, but she had long ago accepted her brother's limitations. "I appreciate your absence more."
"You wound me." He sounded pleased, though, and Vierna knew that he enjoyed her company as little as she did his.
"What else did you find?" She was aware that Jarlaxle had raided several human labs before acquiring this sample, and still had the stolen computers. Trying to pry answers out of simple machines was a mundane task, suitable for the male researchers. Their minds were too shallow to grasp the fractal complexities of biology, but the binary simplicity of humanity's machines seemed to suit them well.
"Nothing yet."
He was lying again. She decided to allow it. After all, the truly important knowledge, the real answers, were in right front of her, in a language only she could read.
Finally he took the hint and left, abandoning her to blessed silence. She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the darkness calm her mind, before going back to examining the blood sample.
She had expected some kind of cludge. A sturdy virus that would keep his immune system too busy to destroy vital organs. Or a hatchet job, cutting out the entire immune system—which would leave him vulnerable to many other diseases, but would stop him from dying immediately. Instead she found a work of art. She studied the sequence that had been grafted onto the end of the strand.
She was humming, she realized, tracing holy geometry on the countertop with her fingers.
The new genetic sequence was a work of art, modulating the subject's immune response rather than distracting it or cutting it out entirely. Whoever had done the work, she had built in a response to the signals that organ failure would send to the rest of the body, telling the immune system to reduce activity if the liver or kidneys or lungs started to die. Vierna felt her breath catch in the way that sudden understanding always granted—the solution was elegant. Beautiful, in its own heretical way.
She started planning viruses to counter it—and it would have to be viruses, because the kind of intensive gene re-writing to undo it would require custody of her brother, which she did not have. Perhaps if she keyed it to attack the organs first, it could make the immune system surrender without a fight.
She started growing a copy of the blood for testing purposes, then kept studying it. It was the work of an hour to prepare a cludge-virus that would accomplish the task.
She frowned, considering how brute-force that approach seemed. It seemed wrong, to use such a blunt instrument to destroy such delicate work. She felt like a virus was the right approach, but perhaps she could make it neater. Something a little more elegant, to show respect for her anonymous counterpart.
She tossed the first version in an incinerator and began again.
Wordcount: 1405
Summary: Vierna wonders sometimes if the flaws of the old jumpships have fallen wholly out of human memory; Jarlaxle would know, perhaps, but she daren't turn his mind to the question if it isn't already there.
[Warnings for canon-typical drow sexism.]
It is a warning known to every every cosmonaut—when you sail the stars and go through a wormhole, you are forever changed.
Forever lasts until the next wormhole.
Before long, humans had developed better travel, faster travel, that didn't require them to send their sailors through rips in the fabric of reality. But the old wormhole-jumpers had never been mothballed, and there were still a few ships out there with the capability, with old engines that can't run along the stars but can skip right through them.
But the old ships grew rarer and rarer as human captains became skittish about their fatal flaw:
When you go through a wormhole, reality reverses itself. You reverse yourself. You come through backwards, down the molecular structure. Your DNA goes widdershins in your blood, and your proteins flip symmetry. You went in right-handed, and you come out right-handed still—but you return to a universe of lefties.
When the body digests malformed proteins—prions—it fails to understand them, then tries to incorporate this failure into its entire being. Men have died with seafoam on their lips and whalesongs in their head trying to bring the universe into a body not ready for it.
After you go through a wormhole, the entire universe becomes incomprehensible, a file your body can't read. All food becomes poison, unless it's gone through the wormhole with you, been translated into protein that is compatible with your new hardware.
And then you go through another wormhole, and the sinister universe rights itself.
To compensate, most pre-faster-than-light fleets had rules about never stopping after an odd wormhole. Battle maps and trade routes went by the rules of two by two by two. Sailors followed this guide for centuries, for so long that, even today, many space captains with faster-than-light engines still take a short break during their journey, long enough to pause the ship, to study a nebula, to wait—what they're waiting for, they don't know.
Some of the older fleets, of course, still use wormhole technology. The universe does not throw away a tool that works. Evolution does not invent so much as it recycles—vestigial traits linger, are given new purpose, until they become necessary again.
The drow fleets, for example, depend on wormhole jumping. They could switch over to faster-than-light—even galactic sanctions are not so powerful as to keep them limited to obsolete spaceflight—but the matriarchs find it a useful tether on their ship-captains. Two by two by two, they say. Two by two by two is eight, and our lady abhors odd numbers. Oddity is for heretics.
Heresy is punishable by death, and death conveniently applies itself to any captains (and their crews) who may have ventured off the carefully cultivated map. The drow matriarchs, every one trained in genetics and bioenegineering, must surely know the real cause of the Death of the Heretic, but they find it more convenient to hide that fact.
They have built control into their sons' blood, carved obedience into their bones. But power held loosely is apt to slip out of grasp, and tools, however crude, should not be simply abandoned. Not when they work.
In a shielded bubble, hidden in the shadow of a crater on the scarred surface of Lloth's eighth moon, Vierna the houseless, formerly of House Do'Urden, frowned at a microscope and studied her brother's blood.
"This is the only sample?" she asked. She didn't look at Jarlaxle. If she looked at him, she would be able to tell that he was lying. If she caught him lying, she would have to do something about it.
Better not to know. If she were of House Baenre or Del'Armgo or even Mizzrym, she could send soldiers or spies to search his base and confiscate any material. But it's just her. She has no soldiers, no spies. His base is also her base, her laboratory and home.
By not asking, she may have made it easier for him to commit blasphemy, but she couldn't solve that right now.
Later, she promised herself. When she's redeemed herself and her name to the great houses, she will have the power to undo whatever damage she has allowed Jarlaxle to do.
"Of course." He perched on a counter, boot heels kicking against the cupboard doors. He could have been a coddled child sitting on a kitchen counter, not in a bioengineering laboratory with rigid expectations for safety and protocol.
Vierna reminded herself that she couldn't just kick him out or tell him to get his ass off the counters. It was, technically speaking, Jarlaxle's lab.
Why was he still here? Vierna squinted at the blood, barely seeing it.
He wouldn't ask what she had found, surely. That would be too bold, even for him. So, she told herself--he was lingering in hopes that she might let some information slip. He would be looking for the same thing she was, no doubt—the key to her brother's survival away from Menzoberranzan's atmosphere—but all of his researchers were male. Even if they had the training to know what they were looking at, they wouldn't be as good. He needed a real bioengineer to tell him what there was—he needed Vierna.
She smirked.
"Get off the counter."
He swung his boots up onto the opposing counter instead, ignoring how it made the glassware clink. Vierna felt her smirk fade.
"Dinin told me you haven't allowed anyone into the lab for months. I thought that surely you would appreciate the company."
"Dinin may appreciate your company." Far too much, by Vierna's reckoning, but she had long ago accepted her brother's limitations. "I appreciate your absence more."
"You wound me." He sounded pleased, though, and Vierna knew that he enjoyed her company as little as she did his.
"What else did you find?" She was aware that Jarlaxle had raided several human labs before acquiring this sample, and still had the stolen computers. Trying to pry answers out of simple machines was a mundane task, suitable for the male researchers. Their minds were too shallow to grasp the fractal complexities of biology, but the binary simplicity of humanity's machines seemed to suit them well.
"Nothing yet."
He was lying again. She decided to allow it. After all, the truly important knowledge, the real answers, were in right front of her, in a language only she could read.
Finally he took the hint and left, abandoning her to blessed silence. She closed her eyes for a moment, letting the darkness calm her mind, before going back to examining the blood sample.
She had expected some kind of cludge. A sturdy virus that would keep his immune system too busy to destroy vital organs. Or a hatchet job, cutting out the entire immune system—which would leave him vulnerable to many other diseases, but would stop him from dying immediately. Instead she found a work of art. She studied the sequence that had been grafted onto the end of the strand.
She was humming, she realized, tracing holy geometry on the countertop with her fingers.
The new genetic sequence was a work of art, modulating the subject's immune response rather than distracting it or cutting it out entirely. Whoever had done the work, she had built in a response to the signals that organ failure would send to the rest of the body, telling the immune system to reduce activity if the liver or kidneys or lungs started to die. Vierna felt her breath catch in the way that sudden understanding always granted—the solution was elegant. Beautiful, in its own heretical way.
She started planning viruses to counter it—and it would have to be viruses, because the kind of intensive gene re-writing to undo it would require custody of her brother, which she did not have. Perhaps if she keyed it to attack the organs first, it could make the immune system surrender without a fight.
She started growing a copy of the blood for testing purposes, then kept studying it. It was the work of an hour to prepare a cludge-virus that would accomplish the task.
She frowned, considering how brute-force that approach seemed. It seemed wrong, to use such a blunt instrument to destroy such delicate work. She felt like a virus was the right approach, but perhaps she could make it neater. Something a little more elegant, to show respect for her anonymous counterpart.
She tossed the first version in an incinerator and began again.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-08 02:54 pm (UTC)The 'two by two by two' bit was all it took for 'The Ants Go Marching' to start running through my head, which was an unexpectedly amusing mental image of the drow ships.
Oh Vierna. This won't end well for you, no matter your promises to yourself. But also - does there exist anywhere in the Universe an individual Jarlaxle does not irritate simply as a matter of course?
I keep thinking that if only Vierna would somehow pull herself away from Lloth - even just a bit- then maybe she could actually go meet the person who'd done the new genetic sequence and learn from them. And then I am sad. :(