Breakthrough

“Please put on the goggles hanging on the hook in front of you,” the voice told her.

After Dredda donned the red-lensed eye protectors, there was a loud thunk, and the surrounding lights all came on at once. The intense ultraviolet bombardment lasted fifteen minutes, during which she was directed by the voice to assume various awkward positions that allowed the germ-killing radiation to reach otherwise hidden surfaces. When the bank of lights finally thunked off, she was told to pull on the pair of plastifoil slippers that waited for her by the exit door.

“You may now proceed to Level Four,” the voice said.

The straight steel corridor leading to Level Four had a narrow, bunker-slit window along one wall. Through the three layers of thick glass, Dredda could see dozens of biotech workers in lemon-yellow hazard suits with oxygen canisters strapped to their backs. Because of the glare of the overhead lights off the hoods’ visor plates, she couldn’t see the workers’ faces. And they seemed too preoccupied with their cluttered lab tables and banks of electronic machinery to notice her passing. The corridor ended in a circular bulkhead door, which stood slightly ajar.

The brightly lit Level Four operating suite was the tiniest of the nested defensive boxes—the most deadly and contagious microbial environment on the planet. The hollow steel cylinder was so narrow that the single bed it contained nearly spanned its diameter. On the walls opposite the sides and head of the bed were rows of triple-laminated glass portholes. Directly below the ob ports, from similar heavily gasketed circular openings, rubberized, liver-colored gauntlets hung down in pairs. Shelves packed with medical supplies and equipment ringed all but the foot of the bed.

At the sight of the cramped enclosure, Dredda experienced sudden difficulty in breathing. The observers noted her distress.

“Your anxiety is only natural,” the voice said in a reassuring tone. “But it is best to continue without delay. Please climb onto the bed, and we will make you more comfortable as quickly as possible.”

Dredda forced herself to crawl forward. The door automatically shut and sealed behind her. As she lay back on the bed, she saw movement through all of the portholes. Technicians in biohazard suits took up positions along the outside of the cylinder and proceeded to thrust their arms into the gauntlets, which allowed them to reach over the bed, more than halfway across her body. All those moving arms made the chamber seem even smaller. And no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t seem to fill more than the top third of her lungs.

To try to calm herself, the CEO focused on her own reflection in the curve of the ceiling. She strained to make out the details of her face, but the brushed metal turned her features into an unrecognizable blur—as if who and what she had been for her twenty-six years had already been erased.

Meanwhile, the pairs of gauntleted hands worked with practiced precision, strapping her down at the chest, waist and knees. Once she was tightly secured to the mattress, the anonymous fingers crawled over her, jabbing the needles for intravenous lines into her arms and inserting a catheter into her bladder. They applied a liquid adhesive to her skin and attached life-signs sensors and neuromuscular stimulators. Finally, gloved hands at the head of the chamber slipped an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth.

Dredda gulped at the hiss of oxygen, which was mixed with a quick-acting sedative gas. It also carried a massive dose of bioengineered virus. After that first deep breath, there was no question of going back. She gladly surrendered to the calm that settled over her.

You are a very brave girl.

Dredda felt hot blood rush to her face and neck. She recognized her father’s voice. It hadn’t come through the operating suite’s intercom speaker; it didn’t exist anywhere outside her mind. Regis Otis Trask, the former CEO of Omnico, had been dead for four years.

Whenever her father had said those words to her, and he’d had the opportunity to say them often, what he’d meant was that she was very brave for a girl. Brave considering that because of her sex, she possessed relatively limited physical and mental strength and endurance. Though she had long understood the reasons for her father’s patronizing attitude, that had never made it any less painful or infuriating.

Dredda’s personal abilities and achievements had very little to do with the power she currently wielded over the lives of tens of billions of human beings. She had inherited her father’s position at the top of the conglomerate’s executive hierarchy, and she had an army of highly capable, highly motivated defenders dedicated to keeping her there. For as long as she could remember, everyone she encountered had looked past her, or through her, and had seen only her father’s awesome legacy.

But Dredda was very much the daughter of Regis Otis Trask. She shared his thirst for conquest and empire, and the need to burn her name deep into the pages of history, desires she could never satisfy as caretaker of a bureaucratic monolith on a dying planet.

For months, preparations had been under way for her unannounced, permanent departure to Shadow World. In secret, Omnico’s top scientists had duplicated the Totality Concept’s reality-jumping technology, and had managed to vastly improve upon it. The transfer of soldiers and matériel only awaited the successful completion of her Level Four treatment, which for security reasons had been postponed until the last possible moment.

Dredda had committed herself to the irreversible genetic procedure shortly after the CEOs’ joint interrogation of the prisoner from Shadow World. The man called Ryan Cawdor had described his Earth as a place of chaos, of perpetual bloody turmoil. Social control did exist, but only in confined areas called baronies, and it was maintained by brute power.

Male power.

To cross over to Shadow World unprepared for that fact would have meant the surrender of everything Dredda had, of everything she had ever dreamed of.

Could Alexander the Great have succeeded if he had been a woman? Could Cortez? Or Napoleon? Her own Earth’s history said no. In times of internal strife, during periods of conquest, males only respected other males, only feared other males. These were the lessons of Shadow World, as well. If Dredda failed to instill absolute terror in her adversaries on the parallel Earth, she knew her relatively small expeditionary force could not prevail.

And she not only had Shadow World males to contend with, but those in her own support units, as well. In a different reality, the old urges of one sex to dominate the other would surely resurface. The selective subordination and subjugation of females was bound to follow. Such an outcome was unacceptable to Dredda Otis Trask.

As her father had so often said, “Chains are meant for other people.”

It might well have been the Trask family motto.

Dredda became aware of a ringing in her ears, the first sign of the spread of the genetically modified virus. Almost immediately, her body temperature began to rise, and as it climbed, the sedation was increased. Long before the infection’s peak, she slipped quietly into a drug-induced coma. She didn’t feel the plastic tube slide down her airway or hear the rhythmic hiss of the respirator begin.

The tailored virus carried a limited set of genetic instructions, which as it replicated, it transmitted to all her cells. These instructions permanently altered the chemistry of her body, reinitiating long dormant physical processes, reactivating the growth plates in the bones of her hips, legs, back, shoulders and arms. Under their new instructions, the targeted cells began rapid, controlled division. As her bones enlarged, cell layer by cell layer, they ached as if they had been shattered by sledgehammers; as they enlarged, the attached sinews, muscles and cartilage stretched to the splitting point. Nerve cells began multiplying in specific locations, as well, which only magnified the intensity of the skeletal pain. The transformation process was so agonizing that it required anesthetic narcosis—early test subjects who were fully conscious had died from the pain within a matter of hours.

Safe in a deep coma, Dredda felt nothing. She drifted in darkness while her body metamorphosed in its stainless-steel cocoon.

Inside and outside the chamber, the atmosphere was anything but tranquil. Biotech teams in three shifts saw to her considerable life-support needs around the clock. Her normal daily calorie intake was quadrupled, and she received constant electrical stimulation of new nerves and growing muscles.

Early on the morning of the ninth day, sedation was terminated. By 10:00 a.m. Dredda was breathing without a respirator. At 1:00 p.m. she opened her eyes. She was still securely strapped to the bed. Empty gauntlets hung flaccidly from the walls.

“How are you feeling?” said the voice through the intercom.

“I hurt,” she said, her throat hoarse from the respirator tube. “I hurt everywhere.”

“That is entirely normal, I assure you. We’re going to release the restraints now. You need to start moving your arms and legs.”

Technicians slipped into gauntlets on both sides of the chamber. Their gloved hands unfastened the straps, which slithered off her. When she sat up, she nearly bumped her head on the chamber’s low ceiling.

“Please be careful,” the voice warned. “You have grown four inches. You are now five feet eleven inches tall. You have gained sixty-three pounds.”

Dredda looked down at herself. Even though she had known more or less what to expect from computer-morphed projections, she recoiled. Her breasts were still there, and the same size and shape, but they looked smaller, flatter because of the expansion of her chest in bone and muscle. The new muscle mass was smooth, quick, not corded or bulked up. Like her breasts, her hips had remained the same size, but they now looked narrow relative to the increased span of her shoulders.

She ran her fingertips over her lips and chin and was relieved to find no sprouting of coarse facial hair. Although her jaw seemed a little heavier, as did her cheekbones and brow, there was no other apparent external masculinization. She had changed into a very tall, very athletic looking female, the tallest, most athletic female the limitations of her existing genetics could produce. Of course, that was just the tip of the iceberg as far as the changes went.

Dredda flexed her right bicep and, despite a twinge of pain in her elbow, was momentarily transfixed by its unfamiliar bulge.

“Based on the previous experiments,” the voice told her, “your lean-muscle mass should continue to increase slightly for a more few days. The new neural connections are already complete, as is bone growth. You aren’t going to get any taller.

“As you know, some experimental subjects, post-transformation, have displayed outbursts of extreme violence. We have only had combat simulations to work from, but it appears that spending long periods of time in a battlesuit under stress aggravates the problem. If you notice any loss of emotional control, you must start injecting yourself with antipsychotic drugs from the battlesuit medikits at once.”

“What are their side effects?”

“Reduced reaction time and increased fatigue.”

“But that would completely defeat the purpose of the procedure!” Dredda exploded.

The voice didn’t respond.

“If I start dosing myself with these drugs, will I have to take them permanently?”

“I’m sorry, but that is impossible to predict,” the whitecoat told her. “No one knows the long-term consequences of the genetic treatment you have been subjected to.”

The slowly simmering anger that had always been part of Dredda’s consciousness was now paired with an entirely different level of agitation, tangible like a hairy-legged insect buzzing, bouncing off the insides of her internal organs. Everything was taking way too long.

“Unseal the door,” she said.

The airlock remained shut, and the faceless whitecoat talked faster. As he spoke, his gauntleted hands made emphatic gestures above her head. “The viral agent we’ve used is extremely infectious and prone to rapid mutation and genetic recombination with other, potentially lethal life-forms. Understandably, we are very concerned about its containment. We strongly recommend that you spend another three days in Level Four quarantine to make sure it has all passed out of your system.”

The other conglomerates that made up FIVE knew nothing of this lab’s existence, nor were they aware of the genetic-engineering project that Dredda had made herself part of. All research connected to trans-reality and bioweapon technology was subject to the terms of FIVE’s founding treaty—only to be pursued as a joint venture. If the alliance got wind of what she was up to, they would turn on Omnico and subject it to a combined military attack that would make her escape to Shadow World impossible.

Moving in a blur, Dredda grabbed one of the whitecoat’s gloved wrists. He tried to pull back, but she held him fast, and as she did, she applied pressure to the slender bones on the back of his hand with her thumb. “Delay of any kind is unacceptable,” she told him.