I frowned, rubbing my chin. I wrote it down on the note sheet, writing POSSIBLE CLEANING ISSUE at the end of each note before I decided to do a retest, running the same blood samples again.

All the same files came up with all the same error messages.

And I was sure that meant I was fucking it all up.

Fuck!

I sighed hard and sat back in my chair, shaking my head before I stood and picked up my sheets, dragging my feet to Marybeth’s office. I gave it a little knock as I stared at the floor. When she hummed a curious note, I lifted my gaze to meet her questioning one.

“A bunch of samples have the same J-N Positive code.” I said lowly, feeling like an idiot.

Her little smile fell and her eyes widened a fraction. “What?” She asked, sounding startled.

I felt like shit. I was messing up and I didn’t know why, but I had to own up to it.

“The same error messages are on another six boxes of samples, for J-N Positive. I tested it on the first machine, and then tested the last two boxes on the second machine. I brought the sheet,” I said, lifting my sheets, “But I still have the program up if you want to come and see. I did a retest on the samples and all the same ones got the same exact error code. I think I’m fucking it up, I’m sorry.” I mumbled, feeling embarrassed.

She stood immediately from her desk, so quickly her wheeled chair nearly fell back. As she came around her desk she pushed her glasses up onto the top of her head, placing a hand on my lower back to walk with me down to my work space. She quickly sat in my chair to go through each of the files, checking my notes before she looked over each file again.

And then she was silent for a long time, just staring at the screen of my computer.

She did a retest before she helped me clean out the machines, putting them all through a cleaning cycle herself before she carefully went through the process of doing two boxes while I watched, standing behind her. As the machine started up, she waited with a hand over her mouth as the results came up on files. I pointed out she hadn’t bothered to put names on the files, but she quietly told me it was alright, and she needed to see if they would pull up any error messages.

One third all the samples she tested had the same J-N Positive error code.

I swear to God, the blood drained right out of her face.

I had read people say that in books, but until now, I had never seen it actually happen.

But sure enough, Marybeth’s blood surely drained….right out of her face.

It was like she aged ten years in two minutes.

She stared at the screen and rubbed her face, her eyebrows up in her hairline ass she held a hand to her cheek in silence. I carefully set my set of sheets down and she jolted a little, immediately placing a hand on the papers to stare at them with wide eyes.

She lifted her chin then and turned in my seat to look to me.

She was quiet for a full minute before she reached out and touched my hand.

“Ren, go ahead and continue processing the rest of the samples, save them like normal, write down all the error notes.” She said with a little shake of her head, standing from my chair, “I’m going to go and get my supervisor down so he can advise.”

I nodded a little. “So that error message-”

“It’s normal to get it one every...two, three hundred patients, but these numbers in one day is simply not possible, and I’ve never had them in a white box – they usually come in the black boxes.” She made a noise, swallowing thickly with an anxious look, “It’s likely that we got a shipment of corrupted binding agents for the blood and the test results are messed up. That happened a long time ago, before my parents were born. So – so just keep testing, and I’m going to come back with my supervisor so he can get his eyes on and see if we need to order new equipment.” She finished quickly, patting my shoulder as she breezed out of my cubicle to walk quickly down the hall, closing the door to her office.

She had never done that before.

The door was always open- maybe closed most of the way, but always opened at least a crack.

I sat down and returned to work, going through the motions of testing, writing down on the spreadsheet any error codes that popped up. I opened each error code to write down the notes there-

Type A Male.

Type B Female.

Type B Female.

Type C Male.

Type A Male.

Type C Female.

It was about an hour before Marybeth came out of her office and hurried down past me. A few minutes later she came over over with an older man in his sixties, his face pinched as Marybeth introduced him as ‘Pedro Yellowbrooke, the head of the testing lab in Riverside’.

He asked what the problem was and Marybeth spoke for me, explaining the amount of J-N Positive error codes. He nodded as he listened before he had me run a cleaning cycle and then test another tray, which an even half of all twenty presented as J-N positive.

“Don’t bother,” Mr. Yellowbrooke said when I went to write it down on the spreadsheet. “Run another two boxes.”

I nodded and did as I was told. I sat there staring at the computer as the machine ran the test, feeling worse and worse that I had broken something.

Marybeth quietly said I was doing everything right, and that helped ease some of the tension in my shoulders as I worked. Maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe it was just the machine. I was just so used to any fuck up with the library machines being operator error, that having these magical machines be at fault was a weird thought.

I got another tray ready to test, and once they were all in the machine, I sat back.

And then we waited.

The machine whirled, hummed, and then beeped, and all three of us leaned closer to the monitor to watch as the results came up.

Of the twenty patient, seven J-N positive.

“Fuck me!” The supervisor hissed, Marybeth letting out a shuddered breath. I frowned and crossed my arms over my chest as I turned my swivel chair and looked between them, Marybeth looking worried as she placed a hand to her cheek and her supervisor’s face hardened. “Alright – shut it all down.” He looked to Marybeth with a hard look. “Not a single prenatal test more. I need to call The City, we could just -” He shook his head, “Someone could have corrupted the samples. The binding agents could be tampered with.”

“That was what I thought. We should retest the mothers, then once we get a new shipment of binding agents, send out a possible contamination report and have them just...toss all the samples.” Marybeth said quietly. “All of them.”

“Exactly.” The supervisor said, “Prepare your clinic for a mass testing – call in anyone that knows how to draw blood-” He frowned, “Test the machines around the clock. While we’re waiting for approval, I want you only doing compatibility testing. Don’t touch another prenatal test until we get to the bottom of this.”

He left then in a hurry, coming back suddenly to take the spreadsheets from my desk and then going to fully jog out of the office.

Marybeth then showed me how compatibility testing worked, something that usually only she and a select few trained individuals did as it was a more delicate testing.

Firstly, the blood went into an entirely different slot of the machines, which only had room for two slots.

I would fill out a different project type called ‘compatibility’ where I would put in the info for two individuals before I put the two blood samples into the machine.

The machine would then test the samples of the two people to see if they would have healthy offspring, which meant the machines would calculate the likelihood of healthy children. The machine ran for a twice as long as prenatal testing, and once it was finished, it would pull up exactly eighty two different strings of code. Our job was to go down each and every code string to make sure every single one read less than one percent under each string.

I was given a short list of codes that were allowed to be higher than five percent (TR1, DD1, DE2 and anything with B as the first letter), but nothing higher than that could pass.

If all eighty two codes meet the right criteria, then they passed.

There were twenty codes that were allowed to ‘fail’ and the project would be flagged so the two matriarchs of the couple would have to look and decide if the couple were allowed to pass.

Of the ones that passed, I had to also double check the code to made sure none of the eighty two codes read JN at the end, because the presence of JN at the end of any code was an automatic fail.

By the time my shift was over, I had read through the matching more than three dozen couples and thousands of strings of code because I had to double check as well. All but two passed, with both of the failing couples possessing almost all their eighty two strings of combined code with JN on them.

Marybeth explained that that two failing out of thirty couples was about the norm for our stage in the colony.

Everyone that started the colony was selected because they did not possess the JN code, but after several generations of breeding, JN was bound to start popping up since everyone had little bits of the code that would eventually click together and present as JN after so many generations.

But the goal of the colony was to make as many babies as quickly as possible between two people with any JN on their string of code.

As long as two people that resulted in a JN string of codes didn’t marry and have children, then the gene would continue to remain mostly dormant in the population, though it would become harder and harder to avoid as the generations went on.

She also said that a colony was only dissolved when the JN gene popping up could no longer be avoided with any test, but that was still several generations away, since there were plenty of sapiens that lacked the JN gene. She said the rule of thumb was that a colony would be able to have anywhere from fourteen generations to twenty, but they could go as long as thirty or as short as ten.

It entirely depended on how good the matchmakers were at their jobs, and if they made matches that not only secured happy marriages, but ones that were happy AND unlikely to result in any JN codes. She said that people that aren’t married until well into their twenties are usually harder to place because they just have genes that are more likely to produce JN codes, but the matchmakers will eventually find them a match.

So far, our colony was on track for thirty generations as they had gotten better with selection when they started up the colonies, with the hope we could be kept in a colony as long as possible.

When I asked what the JN gene mean and if it related to the JN-Positive on the prenatal, she said that it did and had to do with the virus that ended civilization two thousand years ago and nearly wiped out the human species complete.

Which was crazy interesting, because we never talked about history much at all.

If we did, it was just history that related to the start of the colony and afterward.

After I finished all the samples, she let me call my Dad from her office and then gave me some change to get a drink from the bubble machine in the break room while I waited.

Dad showed up about an hour later, and when I jumped into the front bench of the carriage, he gave me a bag of sour cherries in greeting.

“Weird shit is going on at work,” I said as I popped a cherry into my mouth.

“Uh-oh.” Dad said as he gave the reins a jerk, our two horses huffing before they started forward.

“Yeah, machines are all messed up still, they think the blood got corrupted and shit. How’s mom?”