Skin Deep (Legion 2)

Yol had offered me an exorbitant amount to track down the key. I’d refused, though I had forced him to buy Exeltec from me for another exorbitant sum, so I came away from this in a good enough position.

The CDC failed to find evidence that Panos had released any kind of pathogen, and eventually determined that the note on Panos’s computer had been an idle threat, meant to send I3 into a panic. Earlier that morning, Dion had sent me a thank-you note from him and his mother for stopping the government from burning the body. I hadn’t yet told them I’d stolen this thumb drive.

It contained the key, and a . . . second file. A small text document, also encrypted. We’d stared at it for a time before realizing that the key had been printed on the outside of the thumb drive itself. Chapter nineteen of First Kings. Any string of letters or numbers, or mixture of the two, can be the passphrase for a private-key cryptogram—though using a known text, like Bible verses, wasn’t a particularly secure option.

Audrey went out, but left the door cracked open. I could see Tobias outside, leaning against the wall, arms folded, wearing his characteristic loose business suit, no tie.

I raised the sheet of paper, reading the simple note Panos had left.

I guess I’m dead.

I shouldn’t be surprised, but I didn’t think they’d ever actually go through with it. My own friends, you know?

He’d gotten that wrong. So far as I, or anyone else could determine, his fall really had been an accident.

Did you know every person is a walking jungle of bacteria? We’re each a little biome, all to ourselves. I’ve made an alteration. It’s called Staphylococcus epidermidis. A strain of bacteria we all carry. It’s harmless, for the most part.

My changes aren’t big. Just an addition. Several megs of data, spliced into the DNA. I3 was watching me, but I learned to do my work, even when supervised. They watched what I posted, though, so I decided to use their tools against them. I put the information into the bacteria of my own skin and shook hands with them all. I’ll bet you can find strains of my altered bacteria all across the world by now.

It won’t do anything harmful. But if you’ve found this, you have the key to decoding what I’ve hidden. You make the call, Dion. I leave it in your hands. Release the key on this thumb drive, and everyone will know what I’ve studied. They’ll have the answers to what I3 is doing, and everyone will be on an even playing field.

I studied the paper for a time, then quietly folded it and slipped it into my back pocket. I walked to the door.

“Are you going to do it?” Tobias asked as I passed him. “Let it out?”

I pulled out the flash drive and held it up. “Didn’t Dion talk about about starting a new company with his brother? Curing disease? Doing good each day?”

“Something like that,” Tobias said.

I tossed the drive up into the air, then caught it. “We’ll set this aside, to be mailed to him on the day he graduates. Maybe that dream of his isn’t as dead as he thinks. At the very least, we should honor his brother’s wishes.” I hesitated. “But we’ll want to see if we can get the data ourselves first and check out how dangerous it might be.”

As my aspects had guessed, my contacts among the feds said the cancer scare had been a fake on Yol’s part, an attempt to make my task urgent. But we had no idea what Panos had really been working on. Somehow, he’d hidden that even from the people at I3.

“Technically,” Tobias said, “that information is owned by Yol.”

“Technically,” I said, pocketing the flash drive again, “it’s owned by me as well, since I’m part owner of the company. We’ll just call this my part.”

I passed him, heading to the stairs. “The funny thing is,” I said, hand on the bannister, “we spent this entire time searching for a corpse—but the information wasn’t just there. It was on every person we met.”

“There’s no way we could have known,” Tobias said.

“Of course there was,” I said. “Panos warned us. That day we studied I3—it was proclaimed right there, on one of the slogans he’d printed and hung on his wall.”

Tobias looked at me, quizzical.

“Information,” I said, wiggling my fingers—and the bacteria that held Panos’s data, “for every body.”

I smiled, and left Tobias chuckling as I went searching for something to eat.