Implanted (The Ascension Series Book 2) by Heather Letto

or her descendants. Making it possible to extend lives with early detection of inherited medical conditions, for example.” Doc raised his hand and exposed the backside.
    Fran didn’t notice any lingering ink. She moved in for a closer look. With eyes squinted, she just barely made out some squiggly lines.  “Wow. I just thought those were veins or something.”
    Chan moved in and examined for himself. “Yeah. Ink fades over the years.”
    “Exactly. Ink fades.” Doc pushed back from the table and stood. With hands clasped behind his back, he began to pace as he continued the history lesson.
    “After the war, when we put together our own government, we decided to borrow pieces of the technology. If you look at the hands of all First-Gens you’ll see the markings.”
    Fran snorted. “Kind of hard to find any First-Gens in the city these days.”
    Doc nodded in agreement. “After a few years of underground containment, slightly bored, and with ample opportunity to play around in our labs, we brainstormed and tested all types of innovative technologies. And, hey, we were the cream of the crop —the biggest and the best biologists, chemists, geneticists, and techies.”
    Doc wore a boyish grin which morphed him into a younger man. “We moved into an era of supreme scientific enlightenment.”
    “So then they made the Nanobots?” Fran wanted to get to the important parts, like how she would ever truly be free from the Council’s clutches.
    And Pete.
    “We had to first birth the idea of genetic tattooing,” Doc said. “Once perfected, it allowed us to etch complete familial and financial histories onto each person’s unique DNA. In actuality, it was a brilliant way to preserve facts for the history books once the New Earth became habitable.” He nodded to Fran. “The Bots were then born to be carriers—a way to get the programming sequence into the host.”
    “The tracking system?” Chan asked.
    Doc nodded. He resumed his seat at the table, cleared his throat, and held his mug to Ema. “Would you mind a refill?”
    “Tracking came later,” he said after taking a sip of tea. Ema sat back down by his side. “Once the Council realized they could deliver just about anything they wanted into each person using the Nanobot science.”
    “Here’s something you might find amusing.” He nodded to Fran. “At one time real, live security guards roamed the hallways of the housing sector as well as the Agora.”
    “What? Like thugs?” Fran asked.
    Doc shrugged. “Sure, we’ll call them thugs. Unfortunately, since Impervious remained a weapons-free zone, these thugs didn’t offer much threat to the transgressors. Therefore, the Bots were programmed to include receptors that would circulate throughout the bloodstream without losing potency. Staining solutions and Nanobots were added to the water supply, and scanning equipment hung on every wall inside the city. The security team morphed from thugs to Graphies.”
    “To not-so-scary techies schooled in the science of interpreting the scans,” Chan said. “So, how did it work? The scanning process?”
    “Well, the new camera images only showed blobs of color and ID markers. No faces. No personality. To the new security team, each person was nothing more than a blob and a statistic. But with the Bots tied into the fibers of their nervous systems, individuals could be temporarily paralyzed with the swipe of an icon on their imaging screen.”
    Fran felt a wave of revelation wash over her entire body. Then again, dodging security Graphies had been her full-time job once upon a time. All for nothing?
    A sense of madness bubbled up from her chest, and Fran thought it was about to spill over like molten lava. It seemed the deeper Doc went, the stranger this whole story got. As far as she was concerned, it was time to stop talking and start doing. Time to cut to the chase.
    Chan drummed his fingers on the table and Fran suspected he was feeling the same impatience.