by Alex Scarrow
“My mother died a few months before you came to our world,” she continued. “So she is gone. Lost forever. I know I will never see her again.”
“That is regrettable,” acknowledged the judge.
“If you had come sooner, if she had been infected like me…she would be with me now.” She turned to the others nearby. “I cry for those poor people who remain outside. Outside…if they die, then they are lost. Forever… That is the tragedy.”
She had lived the last year of her human life in a shelter made from dried mud bricks and a plastic awning stolen from a garbage dump. Just her and her younger brother and sister. Now all of humanity was her family, her brothers, her sisters. This microcosmic universe was her home.
“The fact that there are enough people out there who remain outside,” she continued, “enough of them to be able to get ships to rescue more—this worries me.” She looked at the judge on high, the other witnesses, and the endless audience.
“I know not all of you are fully here. Some of you exist as a part of your full self, and for you, when you return and reassemble, you must ask this question: Are they a danger to us? Do they have weapons that could hurt us?”
Camille had experienced enough of men in worn khaki uniforms carrying guns, and handheld rockets, and grenades and machetes.
“I am worried. I think we all should be worried. I think we cannot decide what comes next until the first part of the job is done, until we know we are safe.”
The judge stirred. “Complete assimilation of your kind?”
“Yes.” She nodded vigorously. “Yes. They are out there. Still. And while they are, they remain a danger.”
“Your contribution is a valid consideration. Thank you.” It was an advocate witness who stepped forward many hours later to present a very different case. Her appearance to Camille was vague, unresolved. Almost ghostlike. Camille’s sensory outer cells had barely brushed against the next witness in the swirling cauldron. But, as the witness drew nearer, Camille was able to start getting a sense of who she’d once been.
A young girl like her.
“My name is Grace Friedmann. This is only a small part of me, brought here by a good friend of mine, a doctor called Rachel Hahn, so I could be here to speak. The rest of me”—she looked up at the judge—“is with them. The outsiders. I’m trying to reach out to them.”
Chapter 19
“Are you ready for the briefing, Prime Minister?”
Rex Williams felt the eyes of his cabinet: the assembled senior officers of New Zealand’s armed forces, the People’s Liberation Army and Navy, the Royal Australian Navy, all resting on him.
Am I ready?
He’d have answered no, if he were allowed. Three years ago, Rex had been a freshly appointed junior health minister with virtually no experience of leadership or dealing with government officials and no knowledge at all of healthcare. He’d found himself, at the age of twenty-five, the youngest member in the National Party’s history to be on the election team. The party was after the youth vote, and he’d been selected because he was young and good-looking, and that always helped.
Now, three years later, not only was he New Zealand’s caretaker prime minister, but also the civilian figurehead of the recently patched-together Pacific Nations Alliance. He knew he was far too young to be staring at this room full of elder statesmen and silver-haired chiefs of staff in their crisply laundered uniforms. All of them, no doubt, wondering why a boy, barely able to grow a beard, was suddenly running the show.
He nodded. “You can proceed with the briefing. Thank you.”
This was his government’s first full briefing since the fleet had returned last week. There had been voices among the senior officers in the Chinese navy that the scientific data they’d gathered should be for Chinese use only. No doubt their suspicion in sharing information had been provoked by the Americans’ continuing stony silence over in Cuba; they acknowledged the regular transmissions from New Zealand with little more than a yeah, we hear you.
Luckily Captain Xien had silenced his officers’ concerns and brought everything they’d learned about the virus to the table.
The lights in the briefing room dimmed as a small projector winked on and displayed a title slide on the projection screen.
Viral Subject—observations
The presentation had been put together by a team from Xien’s Chinese contingent, with contributory notes from a renowned child psychologist based here in Wellington, an academic linguist down from Auckland, and an American physicist. Presenting the slides was a junior Chinese navy officer.
“Good morning, Prime Minister Williams and cabinet members,” he started nervously. He cleared his throat. “Please forgive my English. It is not perfect. First, I will introduce myself. My name is Lieutenant Choi Jing. Captain Xien, Commander of the People’s Navy, requested that I should present this briefing to you because I have had the most contact with the subject. She, uh…she has, I believe, come to trust me. So…” He left that last word hanging in the air as he fumbled with the clicker, looking for the next slide.
Rex stared at the first image in the presentation. A grainy black-and-white picture of a young, small figure with dark hair walking up a boarding ramp. The image was very poor quality, probably taken from some closed-circuit security camera. Stark light from a nearby floodlight cast hard-edged shadows across the ramp. In the background, he could see what looked like blurs of light, possibly the glare of other floodlights or possibly flames.
“The subject came from among the contingent of civilians gathered in the United Kingdom. I believe you have all read the report about the departure from Southampton?”
Heads in the audience nodded. Rex certainly had. It sounded like the whole thing had been a disastrous screwup—too many people waiting to be rescued, too few boots on the ground, too little known at the time about what the virus was capable of.
“In the chaos, the vetting system broke down, and many civilians were taken aboard that could not demonstrate they had been successfully tested and cleared. The subject took advantage of this disturbance and managed to board our aircraft carrier.”
The Chinese officer moved to a TV monitor. It showed shaky footage taken from aboard the Chinese carrier, down at the waterfront. Rex could see figures rushing in all directions.
He could see flames, dancing up from rows of tents.
Jing muted the sound, and they watched the rest of the short clip in an uncomfortable silence. When it finally ended, Jing spoke again.
“As you see, the departure was very chaotic. The American end of the enclosed perimeter was closer to the containment pen. They were completely overrun when the outbreak chain reaction occurred.”
Next slide. A much clearer picture of the same small figure in a surgical gown, huddled on a bunk in a small empty room.
“We repeated the testing procedure on all the British civilians that boarded our ships several days later. It was during this process that the subject indicated that she was infected. Before her blood could be taken, she made the following announcement.”
Jing looked down at a clipboard of notes.
“These are the words she spoke: I’m remade. I’m a viral manifestation. A human copy. […] Tell them I’m here to help. Tell them I won’t move a muscle.”
He looked up at the audience, then directed his gaze to Rex. “Prime Minister Williams, she offered no resistance. We were able to quickly lock her in the carrier’s radiation isolation chamber. To date, she has cooperated fully to all our requests.”
Rex decided it was the right moment to step in with a question. “I read the report. It appears a large number of the people who gathered in Southampton in response to the radio message were infected, possibly without even knowing about it. So obviously, I have a concern about all the refugees that were picked up. Are we certain she’s the only one who’s
infected?”
“Yes, Prime Minister. All have been tested for saline coagulation response and estrogen levels.”
The refugees were all currently in a floating quarantine camp. Rex’s administration was taking no chances. The camp was a P&O cruise ship, hastily retooled and refurbished to carry the refugees and a small staff of soldiers and medical personnel.
“What about the American ships? The report said they were overrun in Southampton?”
“Mr. Williams…”
Rex twisted in his seat to look down the front row of seats at Captain Xien.
“We were in range for radio contact on the first week.” His English was not as comfortable as the lieutenant doing the presentation, delivered staccato as he struggled to find the right words. “Most of the American ships also escaped, and they made these same tests on their people. The report exaggerates when it says they were…‘overrun.’”
“Well, thank God for that,” sighed Rex.
It really was ridiculous how tight-lipped and paranoid the Americans appeared to be. He knew the current acting president was a man called Douglas Trent. But he knew nothing much about him. He presumed it was the large presence of Chinese members in their alliance that was making Trent so damn paranoid.
Jesus. You’d think 99 percent of the population being wiped out would change things. Apparently not.
Rex turned back to face Lieutenant Choi, waiting patiently to continue with his slides.
“Please, carry on with the presentation,” said Rex.
The next slide made him gasp—not just him, the entire audience.
It took him a few seconds to make sense of what he was seeing on the projection screen. It was clearly another image taken in the same small, sparse room. There was the bunk on which the girl had been huddled in the previous slide. But there was no little girl now. Where she’d been was her green gown and what looked like her bones, most of them on the bunk, some scattered across the floor. The white bedsheets were stained a dark crimson. Glutinous, meaty strands dangled over the side of the bunk, down to the floor where a glistening pile of what appeared to be organs sat in a pool of dark blood.
Rex had once seen a picture of the unpleasant aftermath of a hiker in Yosemite meeting a grizzly bear. It looked a lot like this, as if some large, voracious predator had entered this small room, killed and eaten the girl, and left the pieces it didn’t want.
“The subject, Grace, has demonstrated she is precisely what she claims to be. Not someone merely infected by the virus, but a manifestation of the virus that is able to change form and structure at will.”
Jing turned to point out several details in the image. “This is a more natural condition for her. She has explained to me that maintaining the human form is…a tiring experience for her, so she often chooses this.”
“Jesus Christ!” said one of the Australian officers. “You’re saying that…this mess is actually alive?”
Jing nodded. “Yes. It is a less exhausting, less energy-consuming state for her. She is able to reform her human state, but this takes several hours to achieve.”
Rex felt his stomach queasily flipping over. The slaughterhouse scene in front of him was grotesque enough, but the fact that it could somehow pull itself all back together again like some grisly movie of a person butchered in reverse was hideous.
“If you will observe closely,” continued Jing, pointing to locations on the screen, “the skeletal framework is actually a mixture of real bones and components made from a tough, resinlike substance. The skull is real. The rib cage, the pelvis—these are also real bones. But you might be able to see from this photograph that some of the larger limb bones—the femur, the fibula, over here the humerus, the radius—these are different and made of the resin substance.”
Rex could see that they were darker and thicker, like the bones of a Neanderthal.
“The subject has explained to me that the virus prefers to use the existing skeletal framework of the form it wishes to mimic where possible. Where this is not possible, it is able to fabricate resinous approximations, but this requires much more time and also the sacrifice of living matter.”
“Sacrifice of living matter?” asked someone in the audience. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Sacrifice. Yes,” replied Jing. “The virus is able turn some of its biomass into this hard resin. But the resin cannot return to become part of the biomass again. It is in effect dead tissue, spent biomass.” Choi pressed his clicker again to reveal the girl huddled on the bunk once more. “This next slide is footage of a time-lapse sequence showing the subject deconstructing from human to resting state, then reconstructing. Please note the running time in the corner as the process advances…”
Rex sat back in his chair and wanted to close his eyes. This was too much. He really didn’t want to see a child melt before him.
You have to. You’ll be meeting her very soon. You need to know everything They have.
He opened his eyes and watched and immediately wished he hadn’t.
The room was completely silent, the breath of everyone in it held while the sequence lasted. When it was over, breaths were released; a stirring filled the small conference room.
“At the moment, the subject is only able to communicate in human form. In this form, she prefers to be addressed as Grace.”
“Why has the subject picked that name?”
Lieutenant Choi shrugged. “She has told me that is her name.” He looked down at the clipboard he was carrying. “This concludes my observations and my part of the presentation. I must hand over to someone else now?”
“Dr. Calloway?”
Rex heard a chair scrape the floor behind him, and in the half-light of the room, he saw someone take the place of the Chinese Navy officer. Tall and broad framed, in perfect contrast.
“My name is Dr. Kevin Calloway. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I’m a doctor of psychology, and I specialize in clinical neuropsychology, child psychology, and psychosocial dynamics.” He took in a deep breath, paused for a moment.
“Since we are not dealing with psychosis or a mentally disturbed child but, in fact, a brand-new form of life, my expertise on Grace is arguably of limited value. I haven’t been able to communicate with the subject so far. It appears she is only prepared to—for the want of a better term—assemble for Lieutenant Choi. But I have reviewed the recordings of their discussions over the last two weeks aboard the Chinese carrier.”
Calloway paused, steepling his fingers beneath the bristles of his clipped beard as he appeared to ponder how to continue.
“What it seems we have here is some form of community intelligence, or ‘hive mind,’ to use a bloody awful science-fiction term. ‘Grace’ represents a colony of minds, of which her identity is the most dominant. In the conversations with Lieutenant Choi, she has explained that the girl she assembles into is her…or, I should say, was her. She was a girl called Grace who was affected by the virus in a slightly different way than most other infected people.”
“Different way? Can you expand on that?”
Rex turned to see that the interjection had come from the health minister.
“In some rare cases, it appears that there is a form of slower-rate ‘dormant’ infection. The pathogen gets into the body and then appears to do nothing for some time. Now, whether that’s due to some level of immunity, either natural or from the effect of medications being taken, I don’t know. Grace hasn’t talked about that. She has said, though, that this slow infection has allowed her to act as a go-between, if you will, an intermediary between us and…Them.”
“Them?” Rex Williams spread his hands, exasperated at the term. “I’ve heard that word used several times before. Can you explain to me why we’re calling a bunch of microbial life forms ‘Them’?”
Calloway hunched his shoulders. “Because it appears to
be intelligent, Prime Minister. It can strategize. It can plan. It can reason. But, more than that, it’s not one intelligent entity but many millions, billions even.”
He let those words sink in before trying to put it into another context. “We may have to start thinking of any exchange between ourselves and what’s inside this girl as communication with another civilization. What I’m saying, Prime Minister, is we should start thinking of this as a first-encounter scenario.”
Rex could hear breath being taken in all around him. “You mean like…” Rex didn’t want to say the word; it would sound idiotic, gullible. “You’re talking about an alien encounter?”
Calloway nodded. “It is alien, insofar as we have never encountered life in this form before. Whether it came from outer space, whether it’s a life-form that’s been lying inert for millions of years in permafrost, and because of global warming, it defrosted and came to life…we can’t say. Either way, it’s our first encounter with another form of intelligent life.”
“That’s a load of crap!”
Rex turned to his left. Front row, three or four seats away. It was Bullerton, the Australian defense minister, one of only a handful of cabinet ministers who had managed to get the last plane out of the capitol of Canberra. “We can make a whole load of fanciful bloody assumptions about a goddamn bug…or we can just sterilize the bloody thing!”
Several heads nodded along with that.
“This is a bloody pathogen! It’s a lethal, liquefying bastard of a plague that’s managed to nearly wipe out the whole world! For crying out loud, it was probably engineered in some North Korean lab!”
“Hold on—” began Rex.
“We got a thousand miles of salt water around us,” the defense minister continued, “and we know this thing can’t swim through it or fly over it against prevailing winds, so what the hell are we doing playing around with it? We need to just incinerate this subje—”
