Acosta:Your DNA contains lots of little recipes that tell your body how to grow. Imagine someone sneaks in and changes some of those recipes around without you knowing. Maybe some of those recipes have a few ingredients switched around, like baking sodagets switched with baking powder. Or maybe an ingredient is erased. You don’t notice that something is wrong until you pull it out of the oven or maybe once you take a bite and it tastes wrong. With ERS, one’s body starts rejecting their own organs, which has a cascading effect. It happens fast, and sometimes it happens slow.
Rosita:Okay, but other than those three people, it happened toeverybody. Before we cured it, every single person born on the surface of this planet eventually died.
Acosta shrugs.
Acosta:That is nature. It doesn’t care what’s right or what’s wrong. It’s why things go extinct. But the good news is, you’re here now. We couldn’t save your mom or your dad, but we learned how to save you.
Rosita:Howdidyou fix it? How does the cure work?
Acosta:Again, this was not me but the effort of thousands working together. And it’s not a cure but a prevention. Once we learned which genes were susceptible to getting scrambled, it was a matter of basically locking the genes in place in utero. It’s not a difficult or even a new process. DNA editing technology is hundreds of years old.
Rosita:If the process is that old, why do the Earthers care so much? That seems much less of a change than I even thought. Why do they call us subhuman?
Acosta smiles sadly.
Acosta:Some things we can’t fix. One of those things is people who are from one place disliking people from another place. If itwasn’t that, it would be something else. The reason isn’t important or relevant. It’s a handy excuse.
Rosita:How do we know it worked? The cure, I mean. Not all of us are yet the same age as our parents.
Acosta:Well, the sad truth is, the second generation who were born before we discovered the cure died quite quickly, like your older sister. These second-generation Sonorans rarely survived past two or three years old. And you guys, the altered survivors, whenyouhave children, it looks like you pass the locked genes onto your own offspring, so no more alteration is needed. That’s why they just gave everyone the go-ahead. That’s why those little cousins of yours were so important. They are healthy, and for that, we are all so grateful.
Rosita:This cure was discovered before the gate was opened, so you still had access to the AIs running the ships in orbit. Did you ask them for help?
Acosta seems to stiffen at this question.
Acosta:No, no. They were all decommissioned once we made landfall. That was our agreement with Earth. They were up there, but they’d all been turned off.
Rosita:Yes, but I’ve been reading about them. They weren’t truly decommissioned until the ambassador came and took out the AIs’ processors, right? It was just a switch to wake them back up. They could have helped us find the cure much more quickly. Couldn’t we have—
Acosta:No. Many people asked. But we weren’t allowed, and for good reason. You know about the AI war. Even before we hadinstant communication reestablished with Earth, we knew about it. Besides, we found the solution quite quickly. It just…The solution was not a cure but a preventive measure. There is no cure for ERS.
Rosita:My grandmother used to think the Sickness was deliberate, that the Earth government did something to make it happen. She thought maybe it was in the new colony proliferation kits.
Acosta laughs.
Acosta:Your grandmother had a few run-ins with my wife when she was sheriff. I had a few run-ins with her, too, when I taught your mom. She wasn’t alone in thinking like that. People get talking, and they believe what they want. We tested the vitamins and milk. They are identical to the kits that our families used when they were en route to this planet. Earth would have had to have known the planet itself wasn’t fully compatible. And I don’t see how that would have been possible. There’re plenty of reasons not to like the Earth government, but I’m afraid this one is on Mother Nature.
Day Two
ofFive
Chapter 17
Our next skirmish didn’t occur until the second night, a little over twenty-four hours after the countdown expired.
I hadn’t slept at all, despite Roger’s constant reminder of rule number six. Get plenty of rest. If I’d thought the farm had been transformed before, now it didn’t resemble anything close to the ranch I’d grown up on. I’d forgotten that these drones had originally been designed for construction. They were mediocre at best when it came to farming. But when it came to building structures, they were amazing.
Once the printers had been installed and the additional hoppers and backup drones arrived, having collected insta-set, more filament, and a smaller rapid printer—along with another ninety people—from all the nearby farms between here and Burnt Ends, things accelerated at a rapid pace.
We now had multiple defenses both obvious and hidden surrounding the farm.
We had two walls around the property. The impossible task of constructing a paper-thin, six-foot-high metallic wall to surround the unwooded portion of our hundred sixty acres was completed in an astonishingly short time, followed by the building of a thicker,eight-foot-high wall around the perimeter of the living area of the ranch, giving the hundred forty of us about two acres of space to live in.
This eight-foot-tall wall was in the process of being built up even further, becoming a full-fledged structure on its own. In the end, it would be built in an oblong ring. The thick wall so far contained three gun batteries and a “flamethrower” we couldn’t test because it was supposedly so hot, it would have damaged the wall. It also contained multiple dummy batteries that we hoped would draw enemy fire. We were just waiting for more supplies. When it was done, we’d be able to climb on top like on the rampart of a castle.
This space between the two walls was in the process of being peppered with about two hundred land mines. We didn’t have enough material printed yet to make explosive mines, but Roger had a design for an EMP trap that would supposedly fry a mech’s controls, including the communication unit, the moment any part of the machine stepped upon it.
Each mine was the size of a fruit box, and they had to each be buried and then armed by a trio of drones. One of my honeybees—Candy Jo, according to Roger—had accidentally stepped on an armed mine as it returned from the field, and it’d worked well enough that the primary controller box inside the honeybee had literally melted, completely wrecking the drone.
