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History Guy
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Reads too many books...
Oct 2001
time: 23:24
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Hello. This is the opening part of my new story...or rather the one I've been promising for...months. I hope you enjoy this, though I must say that I've done next to nothing so far. Please excuse the skimpy size as of yet. I promise that it will improve in the second bit. I have many more parts planned out, so please give this one time, despite the pitiful beginning...
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Utopia
Prelude. Death in the Datalinks
"Evil lurks in the datalinks as it lurked in the streets of yesteryear. But it was never the streets that were evil.” –Sister Miriam Godwinson, ‘The Blessed Struggle’
The room was not large at all; in fact, it was instead rather small, at least in comparison to most other rooms in the building complex. Most were comparatively large, and though somewhat bland, they were not uncomfortable. This one wasn’t simply bland and uncomfortable, but it was rather depressing. The walls were painted a blinding white, and it seemed that the light of the room emanated from them, showering luminosity on all four corners of the pitifully small area. This whiteness wasn’t dull, but it certainly left one with a rather gloomy disposition, even for your average, even-tempered Peacekeeper, such as the occupant of the room, Doctor Stephen F. Bourneholm, a scientist in the pay of the U.N., and supposedly a rather fine biologist himself. The man was a graduate of Zakharov’s University of Mount Planet, and he had graduated with high honors. His specialty had always been bacterias, those found on old Earth, and here on Planet also. The time was ripe for such men, men whom the Commissioner himself referred to as the shapers of tomorrow. Bourneholm would qualify as such, though he’d never as yet made any terribly important breakthroughs himself, not as of yet, anyway. There was always the future to look forward to, and that future, to Bourneholm, looked exceedingly bright, all things considered.
The reason for this (and, strangely enough, also the reason for the rather messy and crowded conditions of the little room in which he now inhabited) was the new crusade for the moral rights of all humanity. Commissioner Pravin Lal, the great shaper of the modern world (at least around the vicinity of the Pholus Ridge and the Freshwater Sea), was calling for an all out war on that newest of all evils to mankind, retroviral engineering. Since the breakthroughs in medical science that brought about this horror, the Commissioner had been tirelessly traveling all about Chiron, speaking of the horrors that these breakthroughs would unleash, and calling for the end of these experiments in Retroviral Engineering. The initial reaction had been better than first expected. Large groups of protesters had practically besieged Academician Zakharov’s private quarters, far off at University Base, calling for the abortion of his planned experiments in the field. The people were really afraid of this menace, and they feared what a man such as Zakharov, or a man with even less ethics, could be capable of with this power in his hands. The thought was a frightening thing indeed, and the more Lal spoke, the more people listened. It seemed as if the horrors would never manifest themselves after all. The utopia of Chiron had, for the time, been preserved, but it was still balanced precariously on edge.
The room was bleak, however. It was very bleak, it was gray, cold, and comfortless. Papers were strewn in a graceless manner all over parts of the small workspace, and they piled up in various corners, though some were constantly blown about in the air when the ventilation kicked in. A pile of books on genetics and biology were stacked neatly near the tall desk and computer frame, which sat upon it. The position of these books was probably the only thing in the room that bore the remotest similarity to neatness. Otherwise, it the surroundings were disorderly and chaotic. The computer was itself the only thing that looked decent in the room, itself, being a very new model. The keyboard, though, was old, and sticky with far too much use by men who can only be classified as slobs. It wasn’t Bourneholm’s fault there, though. As untidy as he could be, he knew how to treat electronics.
His task seemed to be at a fulfillment, though. Perhaps he had, as he was assigned, located a planetary lab that was busy producing some of this nasty stuff, these microbes. The Prometheus Virus, which they’d thought to have been isolated, may well have been recreated after all then. It was Bourneholm’s sole job to find, with all the data provided to him by certain individuals in the pay of the Commissioner, to find a scientific institution, anywhere on Planet, which was trying to make a breakthrough in this field. As of the week previous, Bourneholm had found nothing to indicate such work, and indeed quite the opposite. There was nothing. Now, however, there was silence in the room, Bourneholm’s quick-paced typing had ceased. Indeed, the computer monitor was suddenly and inexplicably blank. There could be only one true explanation, and that was a breakthrough. Whatever the case, Bourneholm’s relentless scouring of the datalinks was truly finished.
However, the security camera that was suspended from the ceiling was, unusually, not operating. There was dead silence in the room, and the camera itself too was dead.
The bio-degradable white cup that had once stood next to the keyboard lay on the floor, and it’s contents lay splattered all over the floor, staining several of the papers yellow. The brownish stream intermingled in some places with the stream of scarlet that also flowed through the papers. Dr. Stephen Bourneholm lay outstretched on the floor, his chair discarded beside him. His arms were outstretched, and his eyes were open, yet cloudy and unseeing. His upturned face was a frozen mask. His still eyes betrayed a look of shock and horror, of instantaneous reaction. His mouth was wide open, and inside his tongue was bent in a strange angle. Blood ran wildly out of the wound, where the skull had been crushed. Such was the state of things when a security detail opened the door and found the useless computer, the empty datalinks, and the corpse.
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18-12-2002 04:11
Don't sell yourself short- by saying that the beginning is bad, you're running off customers 
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