The Viral Archive (dream)

Twenty years into the future, I had bio-hacked my body to join an underwater life-exploration science expedition. The modifications didn’t just let me stay submerged for hours - they allowed me to interface directly with our experimental DNA-collection scanner. The device could non-invasively sample genetic material from ocean creatures, encode it into a dormant viral shell, and tag each sample by species. We could collect millions of genomes and store them in a single portable module, a library of life sealed inside a machine the size of a lunchbox.

On the way back from the expedition, our private livery to the airport crashed - skidding off a crowded highway and plunging into the harbor of a bustling African coastal city. The driver died instantly. The rest of us, battered but alive, crawled out through twisted metal as seawater filled the cabin. Within minutes, a policeman arrived. He checked our IDs, the driver’s papers, the vehicle registration - then made a call. I watched his face change. His rifle swung toward us.

“Phones, computers, IDs - now! Get in the car!” he shouted.

We obeyed, dazed and bleeding, with no clue what had triggered his alarm.

While waiting in the back of the wrecked vehicle for his backup to arrive, I noticed something: a burst panel near the driver’s seat had exposed a hidden compartment. Inside were documents - pages covered in what looked like bureaucratic text written in the local language. Desperate to make sense of what was happening, I skimmed them. On my third read, a phrase caught my attention: observation #27. In that language, the word for “observation” also meant “deception” or “betrayal.” Could that be the cipher key?

I started counting every twenty-seventh word from that point onward. A second message emerged - an encrypted revelation outlining a plot capable of overturning the global order. That was what they were after. We were collateral in something far larger.

But how could I preserve the information? Our devices were confiscated. The text was too long to memorize. And judging by the officer’s panic, I doubted we’d live long enough to tell anyone.

Then I remembered the scanner.

The unit still sat in the waterlogged trunk, overlooked by the officer as an irrelevant scientific gadget. I waded through the flooded half of the car and hacked it for a new purpose. Instead of storing biological DNA, I encoded the contents of the hidden document into a copy of my own genome - marking the splice with a deliberate “glitch” signature that would flag itself to any future genetic reader. The scanner’s system then did what it was designed to do: encapsulate the new DNA into millions of viral shells. But instead of saving them, I had the machine eject a capsule.

I swallowed it.

The engineered viruses began replicating inside me, embedding the document within every cell of my body in a process that would only take a few hours to complete. My DNA now carried the secret. Even if they killed me, if all that remained was a fragment of bone or tissue, any forensic DNA match would trigger an anomaly, a signal for scientists to investigate deeper.

They’d find the code.
They’d find the truth.
And the truth would survive.