The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  "Oh my God," said Sulman.

  "They're definitely not DNA strands," Lara said. She was probably the least proficient of them all, had studied the least, but she said it first. "Those are the legs of a T4 bacteriophage."

  Anna stared.

  A T4 virus was a phage, or a bacteria killer. Typically it attached itself to any kind of bacteria with its six legs, bored through the outer layer with its screw trunk plate, then injected its own DNA or RNA in. Those bits of genetic information then mutinied against the bacteria's existing command structure and took it over, rewriting the host cell's code into producing millions of copies of the T4. The host cell would then explode, spitting out the virus' babies to spread out and strike again.

  T4 phages didn't attack human cells. Anna was certain of that. They certainly didn't climb inside them and encapsulate their nuclei.

  Jake and Lara muttered to each other. Anna just stared at the twitching image.

  There were no other features of a human cell at all. No ribosomes, no mitochondria, no Golgi or lysosomes, just the squat blunt head of the virus and its spidery legs spreading out. What they'd taken before to be cell features, via blurry optical analysis, now looked more like blotches of waste spat out by the virus as the end result of bacteriophagic consumption.

  It hit her in ways she had not prepared for.

  "That has to be a mistake," Jake said quickly. "It could be a freak moment mid-injection, or two layers are overlaid; maybe the ultramicrotome didn't slice properly. There has to be differentiation; something like this can't even exist in nature. T4 viruses don't cohabit inside human cells, they can't, they take over bacteria and move on. Anna..."

  "It's a cuckoo," Anna said.

  "We don't know anything yet," Lara said steadily. "That's one brain cell. We already know brain function moved to the spinal column in the year after the comas. We should expect to find something different there."

  Anna already knew. It was a sick feeling in her gut, and she knew.

  "It wasn't mid-consumption or layers," she said. Her voice sounded cold and sick, like she was vomiting up the reality she knew inside. "Didn't you see it twitch?"

  "That was involuntary," Jake said, "on heat-death from the electron burn."

  "Watch the clip," Anna said. "Slow it down please, Sulman."

  He did. There were only 1.2 seconds of footage, and he slowed them threefold. They watched as the bacteriophage virus clenched its six legs in, pulling the cell walls toward the center.

  "It's protecting its nest," Anna whispered. "Contracting on death like a spider. You see that, don't you? If that was involuntary burnout it wouldn't pull in the walls like that. If it was mixed-layers the cell wouldn't react at all. Lara?"

  Lara said nothing. They stared at the screen, showing the frozen image from a millisecond before the layer burned.

  "It's completely new," Jake said. "We expected something new. It doesn't mean anything."

  His reassurance fell flat.

  "Let's see another slide," Anna said. "From the spinal column."

  Jake collected one. A button on the microscope ejected the previous burned sample and he slotted in the new one.

  "Sulman."

  Sulman pushed a button. Electrons fired. An image popped up.

  It was the same: a T4 inside a cell where a T4 should never be. The image twitched then fried.

  "It doesn't mean-" Lara began but Anna cut her off.

  "Another one. Have we got slices from different subjects?"

  Jake pulled his gaze from the screen. "Uh, yes."

  "Can we see one, please?"

  He snapped out of the daze and collected another slide. Eject, insert.

  "This is a lumbar spinal bone puncture; spinal fluid from another live sample. He's strapped down in the next room."

  The image came up. It was the same. The size of the cell was different, its connections to its fellows were different, but the T4 still hung there around the nucleus like a louse hidden under a rock, lurking, eating and making all the decisions.

  "Control sample," Anna said. "You have a control?"

  Jake looked at her blankly.

  "From one of us. Non-infected. Hair, skin, anything."

  He snapped out of it. "Of course. Yes. What shall I…?"

  "Skin," Anna said through a dry mouth. "Load it up, please."

  He did; ejecting, injecting, clicking to lock. "This is from me, a skin cell."

  Sulman played it.

  It was the same.

  Lara gasped and put her hand to her mouth.

  In the middle of a healthy functioning cell, with normal thickness cell walls and plasma, with all the essential cell features like mitochondria and lysosomes, squatted the T4.

  "Oh my god," Lara whispered.

  "It's in us too," said Anna. "Zoom in."

  * * *

  They worked for hours, burning through sample after sample, building up a library of video clips and images. They barely spoke but for the surgical precision of requests from Anna to Jake. The only other sound was the shush of the extraction fans and the click of glass slides ejecting in and out of the microscope's hub.

  They zoomed in to the limits of the machine's resolution, they conducted stains and freezes and metallic overlays, teasing out the microscopic secrets of the ocean infection as best they could.

  "The telomeres," Sulman said, looking at a cryo-fixed floater eye cell. "They're capped with a protein chain I've never seen before."

  They all looked.

  "What the hell is that?" Lara whispered.

  "They don't age," Anna said. She was hardly looking anymore. Telemere strands were essentially cellular fuses that determined the lifespan of all living things. The longer the fuse, the more time a given cell could self-replicate. It happened with skin, with brain cells, with every bit of tissue in every creature on Earth.

  "The ocean don't heal," Anna went on, dully. "They don't regenerate. At the same time, they hardly need to eat. This is the reason. Show us one from a human sample."

  Jake scooped one out of a liquid nitrogen flask with a pair of tongs, sliding it into the dark electron hub. Sulman focused in on the telomere strands and Lara gasped again.

  "It's a loop," she whispered. "It should be a fuse."

  "A loop," Jake echoed. "What does that even mean?"

  Anna snorted. "That we'll live forever? That we hardly need to eat or drink either, but we know that already don't we? Our cells regenerate less than ever before, we get by on less sleep and we do more with our days. The only way that can work is if the T4 is bringing efficiency and immunity in ways unheard of."

  "It's true we never get sick now," said Jake. "Not even colds. Could the T4 be doing that?"

  "The T4 is us," Anna said flatly. "Whatever or whoever did this to us, it's changed us forever. This is what we are now."

  The crisp image on the screen faded as the electrons burned through the ice. The T4 twitched as it defrosted and burned away.

  Anna gagged.

  This thing was in them all, living and dead alike. It had taken them over completely, fundamentally changing their biology. It was in her now and in whatever dry husk remained of her father, driving him on.

  "Maybe I can decode it," Jake said hurriedly. "Or Sulman, together. We can unspool the center, look at the DNA strings and understand it. There's so much to learn. Maybe it can be reversed."

  Anna shook her head. It was too much. It was the opposite of all her hopes, that maybe something of her father might still remain, that his memories and his kind self and his cozy voice could still linger on beneath the gray, that she might one day bring him back if she could just find the right key to turn.

  That belief was gone now. Her father had died a long time ago, consumed from the inside. She couldn't free him from the T4 without tearing his cells apart.

  She gagged again.

  "Anna," said Lara. Her face was pale and her eyes were watery. She was in shock too.

  "It's OK," Anna said.
"I'm OK."

  She turned and walked away, unable to shake the memories that kept replaying in her head. They were from when she was a little girl, during the dark and lonely nights on her long trek across the country with her father. From her sling she'd gaze into his glowing white eyes and find some small measure of comfort.

  It had never been her father, though. It had always been this alien virus looking back.

  "Anna, wait," Lara called.

  Anna ignored her, tearing off the white hat and pushing through the airlock alone.

  18. NECKLACE

  Anna walked through the campus at random, barely noticing where she went. There was sand here too, blown by ten years of wind and nestling amongst overgrown verges of parched yellow grass. Bright purple wisteria climbed over everything, in places strangling ground-lights aimed up at the impressive buildings, in others coating the road like the red weed from War of the Worlds. The air stank of summer dust and pollen.

  She passed by the library. Here she and Jake had spent hours studying up on viruses and bacteria and whatever might have caused the ocean. They'd rigged up a handle and pulley to open the electronic doors smoothly.

  She threw an ornamental rock through the glass. It smashed but it wasn't satisfying.

  At the edge of the campus she climbed over the low wall through a screen of fig bushes, out onto a leafy road facing three-story-tall townhouses. She'd put rocks through all these windows if she had the energy, but she didn't. A gun would do it.

  She smashed into a black SUV sitting on deflated tires under the shade of a kumquat. A decade of dropped and rotten fruit covered the roof, hood and windshield, baked to a tough crust. She smashed open the driver-side window and sat on the glass strewn seat in the hot dark and began to cry.

  It came in swollen waves. It came and came. In the midst of it she shimmied a screwdriver loose from her yacht-belt. A piece of glass cut into her thigh and she swept the pieces away with her bare hand. Blood smeared against the sun-cracked leather seat.

  With the screwdriver she levered the steering wheel mount casing off and pried out the wires. With snub-nose pliers she cut two wires and sparked them together. It was a futile gesture as the battery was long dead and any fuel would have long since evaporated, but somehow it made her feel better.

  The tears kept coming. She flipped the seat back and lay still looking up at the discolored roof. With her eyes closed she thought back to the day she'd first run out of her home, chasing her father into the flood.

  They'd all been infected then. They hadn't liked her or loved her, they'd just been agents of this tripod-virus, nestled deep in their every cell, driven by some unknowable need to be near her.

  It made her want to puke, so she got out of the car and puked. When it was done she walked. She threw stones at windows when she found them. A plan began to form in her mind. She walked toward the sea, toward the theater, toward her 'home'.

  It was time.

  * * *

  Her room was hot and still, the air-conditioner on furlough while Masako's team of power plant engineers made upgrades to the generator block transformers. She hadn't made a single change in this place since moving in. The pink wallpaper still adorned the walls, though it was peeling and yellowed with years of unchecked humidity. The dresser still had stickers of boy bands and Johnny Depp.

  From the bottom drawer she pulled her father's phone. She kept it charged, replenishing the battery once a week, and stored it in a plastic wallet in a cool dry place the rest of the time.

  She tipped it out now and slipped it in her pocket. Her leg was still bleeding a little. That was OK. It had run all down her leg into her sandals, gumming up around her heel.

  "Anna," came the soft voice of Cerulean at the door.

  "Robert," she answered, "come in."

  He pushed the door open and sat there in the entrance. He was really a good man. He deserved better than this. It was strange to think the T4 was in him too.

  "I know you're upset," he said. "They're looking for you all over. Let's talk."

  "Talk about what?"

  "The microscope. I'm no expert but I know what it means."

  She looked at him. His nice warm face made her happy and angry at the same time. She loved him, and wished she could make him understand without all the pain it would cause. "I rode with a virus for two months, Cerulean. I pressed up to its chest like it was my Daddy. You tell me what that means."

  "You didn't know it was only a virus," he said calmly. "You still don't."

  She shook her head. "I knew. I just didn't want it to be real. For ten years I've pretended, making-believe like he always taught me, but make-believe won't save us from the truth."

  "What truth?"

  She strode up to his wheelchair and looked down into his sweet dark face. This was the age her father must have been when he left. There were already bits of gray in Cerulean's beard. She couldn't even remember what her real father looked like; there wasn't a single photo of him in the phone.

  "That this little community is a fantasy, Robert. It's Amo's fantasy and we all joined in happily, but there's just not enough of us to keep it going. You know it too. Thirty-six is not enough for healthy genetic diversity. We'll get one or two more generations then we'll be gone, or so interbred we may as well be. That's the truth."

  He looked up at her. His eyes were so strong. It broke her heart that this strength was built on a lie. "I don't believe that. More people come in all the time. We're still building cairns."

  She touched his cheek. "Cairns that nobody sees. There's nobody left out there, Cerulean. Ravi came four years ago and there's been nobody since. We're alone, and if we can't bring the ocean back to life we're finished. It's over, turn out the lights."

  He shook his head. "Maybe something will change. They're still going through samples in the lab, studying the connections. You don't know-"

  She shook her head. "I do know. I've always known, and now I've had enough of Amo's fantasy. Julio was right in that at least. The rules are different now."

  "Julio? He was insane."

  She shrugged. "Maybe I am too. We're all mad here, you know?" The words from Wonderland slipped out easily. "My father is a virus and I was his Alice, but I'm tired of the fairytale. I want to live in the real world, and none of this is real, Robert, not even you and me. I'm sorry, but I can't be a part of it anymore."

  She reached up and tugged the silver necklace from around her neck. The chain snapped with a sharp little pop. He'd given it to her ten years ago as a symbol of their mutual adoption. He wore one too.

  She dropped it in his lap. "Keep it. I'm sorry I can't be a better daughter. I do love you though, and I appreciate everything you've done for me."

  Tears came to Cerulean's eyes. "Where are you going?"

  "You know," she said. Now she was crying too. "Where I've always belonged, where my first father's waiting for me. It's been a true pleasure."

  "It was my pleasure," Cerulean said, and scooped up the silver necklace. It twinkled like a fragile telomere strand in his dark hands. "It may be a fantasy, but I'm proud of it still."

  "We all have to grow up Robert, sooner or later."

  She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. He took her hand and squeezed it for a second, then let go. She picked her bag up off the bed and slid past his wheelchair into the hot night without looking back.

  19. RAVI

  Ravi found her on the beach, wandering north with a bottle of whiskey dangling from her hand. She didn't like the taste, but with three good glugs down, the wooziness helped take off the edge.

  Leaving everything behind.

  He came along on a dirt bike, calling out her name over the drone of the engine. The bike's single headlamp made him look like a charging cyclops.

  She didn't respond at first, just kept on walking until he saw her. He pulled up the bike and killed the engine with the lamp still on.

  "Anna," he called.

  She smiled and slurred her spee
ch. "Ravi. Come over here."

  He ran over and stopped before her, fidgeting awkwardly. His face was hot and flushed. "Cerulean told me you're leaving. Is it true?"

  She nodded. "I'm leaving. Here." She held out her hand. "Walk with me."

  "You're really going to cross the Pacific?"

  She laughed. It sounded crazy spoken aloud. "I suppose so. Take my hand."

  He looked down at her hand doubtfully. "You're drunk."

  "You can be drunk too. Come on."

  "I don't want you to go."

  "Then come with me."

  He shook his head. "I don't want that either. I don't like the water, Anna. I just want you to stay."

  "And the oysters didn't want to be eaten by the Walrus and the Carpenter," she slurred. "It happened all the same. I'm going, Ravi. I told you that years ago; now it's happening. Maybe I'll even miss you. You'll miss me too, that's good. Now can you help me drink this whiskey? I don't think I can manage it alone."

  He stared at her wide-eyed. "You'll miss me?"

  "Maybe," she allowed.

  "So miss this," he said, and leaned in and kissed her. It was warm and wet and messy. She kissed him back. It wasn't her first kiss, not their first kiss, but it was the first that might mean something, and it warmed her more than the whiskey.

  She pulled away and they both gasped. Ravi looked surprised by what he'd done. Anna wiped her lips and held out the whiskey.

  "Here," she pressed the warm bottle into his hand. "Start with a small sip or it'll choke you up."

  "I know how to drink whiskey," he said raspily. He took it, swigged it, then coughed. She refrained from laughing.

  "Walk with me," she said, "until the dawn."

  "You can't really be going. It's too far. You might die. You don't know what's out there."

  "I'm going." She took his hand. "So I'll find out. You can walk me to the door."

  She walked and he let himself be led, leaving the bike behind with the lamp still blazing like a lighthouse beam.