Читать книгу The Fallen Heroine - Fabienne Gschwind - Страница 29

At three o'clock in the morning I decided not to fiddle around for long and to make use of all the money I now had. I rented a small autonomous copter. To gain time, I set the start at four o'clock in the morning, took my bag, threw in some clothes and a hygiene pack, strapped on my forearm computer and rode by bicycle to the small airfield where the copters were parked. Thanks to Adalin, it was no problem to do without sleep. I just had to be careful not to overdo it.

It was a stone's throw from the airport near Basel to my home village of Ferrette, and I took a simple rental bike for the thirty-kilometer trip.

I spent the whole morning with my parents, who had taken the day off, and I picked up my younger siblings from school to take them all to lunch at a five-star inn. Thanks to Tamara, I had now become a gourmet as well....

In the afternoon, I put my great uncle in a ladder truck and pulled him by bicycle to our carp pond while my parents went to work.

We sat down on the bank with our fishing rods. My great uncle seemed to be having a good day and was pretty clear-headed today.

"Are you enjoying your work, little repro hunter?" he asked as we speared worms onto the hooks.

"Yes, fun!", I declared. "Good, because a lot of people hate it. Or are terrified. How's your drug use?"

He laughed and explained that he had been developing combat armor for the ReS for nearly 60 years, he knew exactly what drugs the sailors would take. "Talk to the duty medic and make sure you don't overdo it," was his tip and after pulling out a fish he continued, "I've seen your movie clips, you're really good. You must have inherited Grandma Jasinthe's talent, she was one of the best repro catcher ever."

I just knew Jasinthe was my great grandmother and was totally amazed that she was a repro hunter. "No not hunter, catcher. She captured repros, humans as well as animals for research purposes and she was a master in that field. Let me tell you."

The story was so exciting that I didn't even realize there was a fish on the line.

Jasinthe had been through the whole apocalypse as an young girl. She was highly intelligent and wanted to explore how to deal with the repro differently instead of killing them all. So she spent a lot of time observing the repros. After many attempts, she understood how to be among repros without being attacked by them. She smeared herself with repro slime to look and smell the same. The most important thing of all was to stay calm. Just like sharks that seek out injured animals, repros were attracted to fast frantic movements. Jasinthe became so skilled in this art that she could effortlessly move through forests and collect repros, especially human repros, and even take them by the hand and take them with her. She collected thousands of repros over 15 years and brought them to research centers where the vaccines were studied. Experiments were conducted to train more people in this art. Just as the first apprentices were succeeding, disaster struck. Jasinthe had five children and a husband. Two children, one of whom was my grandmother, were old enough to attend boarding school. The others at home were all infected. Jasinthe woke up one day to find that her family had become repros. She kept it a secret for weeks. The repros did not attack her, she could still hug her children and her husband remained peaceful. But then it came out. It was claimed that Jasinthe had had so much contact with the repro mucus that she carried the viruses on her body and passed them on, at that time there was no vaccine. She herself had been imunized, of course. Her technique was banned and her research was classified. She herself was executed because it was assumed that she would be reprogrammed anyway. Everything was forgotten.

With so much new knowledge and after a beautiful evening with my family, I made my way back. I could hardly wait to talk to Tamara about it. Maybe she knew something about it.