Hellbent

Tears glistened on his cheeks. “I thought I was gonna die here. I’ve been alone with… in the middle of…” His sobs deteriorated into dry heaves.

Van Sciver looked past him at the dead agent and felt a spark of hope flare inside his chest. The body looked reasonably well preserved hanging there. Van Sciver forced his excitement back into the tiny dark place in his chest that he reserved for Orphan X. He’d been close so many times, only to have his fingertips slip off the ledge.

“The harness kept him off the ground,” Van Sciver said to Thornhill. “Away from the elements. We might have a shot.”

The passenger reached toward Van Sciver. “Water,” he said. “I need water.”

Thornhill darted inside, hopping gracefully through the wreckage until he stood beneath the agent, practically eye to eye.

“He’s fairly intact,” Thornhill said. “Not gonna place at the Miss America pageant, but still. We got us a good-looking corpse.”

The passenger gave with a dry, hacking cough. “Water,” he whispered.

“Let’s get the body out,” Van Sciver said.

“I’ll unclip the harness,” Thornhill said, “and you ease him down. The last thing we need is his festering ass disintegrating all over the fuselage.”

“Please.” The passenger clutched the cuff of Van Sciver’s pants. “Please at least look at me.”

Van Sciver removed the pistol from his underarm tension holster and shot the passenger through the head. Taking hold of the passenger’s loafers, he dragged the man clear of the fuselage. Then he returned to the downed helo, and he and Thornhill gently guided the agent down. It involved some unpleasant grappling. The stench was terrible, but Van Sciver was accustomed to terrible things.

They carried the corpse gingerly out into the midday blaze and laid it on a flat stretch of ground. Thornhill’s eyes were red. Choking noises escaped his throat. They took a break, walking off a few paces to find fresh air. When they got back to civilization, Van Sciver realized, their clothes would have to be burned.

By unspoken accord they reconvened over the body. They stared down at it. Then Van Sciver flicked out a folding knife and cut the clothes off.

The bloated body lay there, emitting gases.

Thornhill was ordinary-looking by design, as were most of the Orphans, chosen so they could blend in, but his smile was unreasonably handsome. He flashed it now.

“This shit right here? We are livin’ the dream.”

Van Sciver reached into his cargo pocket, removed two sets of head-mounted watch-repair binoculars, and handed one to Thornhill.

“Any idea where it would be?” Thornhill asked.

“Fingernails, toenails, hair.”

They tied their shirts over their mouths and noses like bandidos, got down on all fours, and began their gruesome exploration.

The first hour passed like a kidney stone.

The second was even worse.

By the third, winged insects clustered, clogging the air around them. Shadows stretched like living things. Soon it would be nightfall, and they could not afford to wait another day.

Thornhill was working the agent’s hair, picking through strand by strand. Finally he sat back on his heels, gulped a few quick breaths, and spit a wad of cottony saliva to the side. “Are we sure it’s on him?”

Van Sciver paused, holding one of the agent’s jaundiced hands delicately. It was goosenecked at the wrist, ready to receive a manicure. The skin shifted unsettlingly around the bone.

Sweat trickled down into Van Sciver’s eyes, and he armed it off. He could still see through his right eye, but after so much meticulous concentration the blown pupil and bruised retina gave him trouble focusing. He could feel the muscles straining. He did his best to blink free the moisture.

Then he froze, seized by a notion.

Leaning forward, he parted the dead man’s eye. Its pretty blue iris had already filmed over. He thumbed at an upper lid, splaying the lashes. Nothing. He checked the lower lid next.

And there it was.

A lash hidden among others. It was glossier and more robust, with a touch of swelling at the insertion point.

It was a hair, all right. Just not the agent’s.

With a pair of tweezers, Van Sciver plucked out the transplant and examined it more closely.

The lash was synthetic.

This was not the future of data storage. It was the original data storage. For billions of years, DNA has existed as an information repository. Instead of the ones and zeros that computers use to render digital information, DNA utilizes its four base codes to lay down data complex enough to compose all living matter. Not only had this staggeringly efficient mechanism remained stable for millennia, it required no power supply and was temperature-resistant. Van Sciver had reviewed the research and its big claims — that one day a teaspoon of synthetic DNA could contain the entirety of the world’s data. But despite all the outlandish talk of exabytes and zettabytes, the tech remained nascent and the costs staggering. In fact, the price of encoding a single megabyte with digital information was just shy of twenty grand.