Skokie was not sleeping, she was wide awake. With her eyes closed. Lying in bed. Picturing a microbe that can pass itself off as the host's; like cancer, but without any indicators of disease. Then it triggers death, no natural immunity, no countermeasures, the world dies-off in a matter of months.
This was her fear, her nightmare.
Ever since nanotechnology offered instant cures to nearly any medical cause and symptom, the study of micro-biology and biological warfare had largely stagnated except in the hands of crazy people. Skokie was one such crazy person, often claiming that like HIV, there could be a disease that tricks the nanotechnology to attack healthy tissue. This cross-training in nano-technology largely meant she used to be responsible for developing software-patches for firmer diagnosis, and ability to treat without such nasty side-effects like making clone-armies, memory-wiping people suffering from minor headaches, or trying to re-define the human race to match a single person (although she could think of a few cultists who'd just
LOVE that).
Her reasons for joining were largely simple. -IF- her thesis were correct, then the entire human race would be in oblivious danger, however, to get anybody to get off the asses and develop the required patches to safeguard against a nano-biological 'Trojan horse' she would have to prove such a disease can exist... which means she needs to obviously infect something, and prove current remedies do not work. However, she and her benefactors believed that if such a thing ever did exist, they wanted work done on it as far as humanly possible from Earth, for obvious reasons in case they fail to find a cure for this undiscovered incurable disease.
But she still needed to infect an organism. The crew would be left-out of the equation, as she brought a batch of fish, small, and likely to become severely inbred after enough generations if their gene-pool isn't altered on occasion to removed defective mutations on an irregular basis. These fish increased the carbon-footprint, so the algea-scrubbers had to be spliced to improve efficiency, which was a bit more than expected and allowed for a garden-space after adding a compost/fermentation center from disused algea-tubes 43 and 48 respectively, while the garden occupied tubes 44 through 47 and the spaces in between. In the garden were also a few hens and a rooster to lay eggs, the eggs were mostly to provide an incubation-medium for her diseases before subjecting them to the rigors of infecting a host with an immune system (natural or artificial).
Getting out of bed, she finally saw ALICE was trying to get her attention as she picked up a toothbrush, picturing her mother scolding her to "clean your teeth with nanobots like a normal person". Rebelously, she flicked on a recording, well... not really a recording so much as a playback program.
Being a small crew, the ship had payload to spare, and she made sure to bring a load of scrap drives and other electronics for research, in case they plan on building some sort of working 'welcome-center' she wanted to be able to build her own computer from scratch with whatever was out there if necessary, 2d silicon disc-drives instead of 3d aluminum aerogel holographic drives. These older ones had served their original purpose,
now they were more of a warning. She managed to rig the drives to a radio-interference controller, essentially giving meaning to every gesture into a drive making its own unique noise.
By this time ALICE chirped, one of the few noises Skokie had not firewalled, although she did set a flood-limit for obvious reasons.
Groaning, she sulked to a datapad and purused the information from the AI's newest report.
"The last one. Drop a probe on the others." She answered to her mute electronic servant as she scribbled a note and placed it alongside one of the disc drives (#4) just after it shattered in the middle of a high-note, it read: This will be you, Alice; in 6 years.
She then returned to siphoning alcohol from the fermenting-tank, and prepared for the usual guests to ask how work was going in the funny farm.
Ohm,
DarkStar,
Morgin,
O O,
PrinceAlexus,
Majoraa,
xVampire3go,
k4tsukibakug0,
Hibachi90,
iibread
