Defiant: Quantic Dreams Book 2

by Elizabeth McLaughlin

  She shoved my hand away with a weak smile. “That is the good news, Jacob. Knowing the nature and transmission of the virus is the biggest key in formulating a vaccine. It also means that it isn’t airborne.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Airborne viruses are just that-they travel through the air. Very, very difficult to stop transmission and spread. Droplet spread viruses are a lot easier to deal with in comparison. They’re spread through most bodily fluids. Sneezing, coughing, vomiting, et cetera. Slowing the infection rate isn’t what I’d call easy, but it means that quarantining everyone as soon as we could probably saved dozens of lives, if not hundreds.”

  Good to know that my wild stab in the dark actually turned out to be useful. “And a vaccine?” A vaccine wasn’t just the key to reintegrating the population, it was the only way that a successful colony could be established.

  “That’s going to take a little longer, I’m afraid. Five hundred years ago, the fastest vaccines took over a year to develop. We have far better technology these days, of course, but given that this appears to be a completely new pathogen it’s still going to take me well over a month. Maybe two. We’re working on weakening or completely deactivating the virus but I won’t be ready for human trials until I can make some headway there.”

  “And in the mean time? It’s barely been a full week and people are already starting to break quarantine. I caught two people out earlier today...” I shut my mouth. Nobody else needed to know about the conversation I had overheard. Spreading news of dissent would only worry her, and Phoebe had enough weighing on her.

  “You did? What were they doing?”

  “It’s nothing. I’m sure they were just airing their frustrations. Anyway. So what do you recommend as an overall strategy?”

  “Keep people inside. In lieu of regular socializing, perhaps we can use the athletic fields as a gathering place. People would have to wear masks and keep their distance from each other, but I don’t think it would pose too great a risk. If anyone gets belligerent, hell, lock them up in the pod room for all I care. Let them get a taste of what real isolation looks like while being taunted by the memory of a normal life.” Phoebe’s words surprised me. Her suggestions were reasonable and her recommendations something that I would take under heavy advisement. What surprised me was the vitriol I heard in her voice at referring to those who would flout the new rules. I couldn’t blame her. While I was busy running around like a chicken with my head cut off, Phoebe and her team had been fighting for their lives. I couldn’t blame her for venting a little anger towards people who didn’t take this seriously.

  “Phoebe, do you need to tag out for a while? I know your team is stretched thin but I can honestly sit there and hang an IV bag or two.”

  She raised her arm as if she were going to rub her face but stopped and sighed heavily. “I really do need a rest. The other doctors have been looking to me this whole time and the only other person with as extensive medical training is watching her daughter foam at the mouth in four point restraints.” The image chilled me. If only I had kept Daisy and Sophia out of the infirmary. In truth it probably wouldn’t have done any good. Still, guilt gnawed at me. There were a million “if onlys”.

  “Can I do anything?”

  “Have you suddenly gained extensive education in triaging rapidly failing patients?”

  “No.”

  “Then you can’t do much. I figure that you can manage sitting there to make sure a patient is still breathing, but I don’t think it would be the best optics for you. Sir.” Her tone turned cold.

  “Go get your rest, Phoebe. I’ll figure something out.”

  While noble in intention, I had shit all idea of what I should do. When I inquired at the field hospital, I was staunchly refused entrance by multiple people. Throwing my weight around as leader didn’t do a thing. If anything, it only served to piss people off further.

  Chapter Fourteen

  What had started as whispers had grown into a full blown roar. News—real or imagined—about the virus spread by the hour and as another full day passed even the people who had voted to keep me as the leader of the shelter grew panicked. I decided against my better judgment to gather the shelter on the former athletic fields. There wasn’t enough room to space everyone out evenly to truly mitigate risk of the virus spreading but I felt that if anyone had grievances with me, they deserved to air them to my face.

  It went about as horribly as possible.

  “We want to go back!” The resounding cry came from various points in the crowd. “You can’t leave us to die here!” It’s easy to forget that at the end of the day, we are herd animals. Humans like to think of themselves as the great and mighty hunters of this world but introduce a threat into the crowd and the very smell of fear from each other drove us to drastic deeds. Gabriel had taken full advantage of the epidemic and my distraction to cement the idea of returning to the virtual world among the populous. He hadn’t provided any details about how he would do so, but the suggestion was enough to break the fragile trust anyone still held in my leadership. As I stumbled through a coherent response to their cries I spied Gabriel leaning up against the back wall, his arms crossed. He met my gaze and held it, pulling down his mask to reveal a slow grin spreading across his broad face. Was it me, or could I see a reflective orange glint in his eyes, even across a room this large? Ever so slowly, as to not attract the attention of anyone around him, he uncrossed his arms, held up a finger, and tapped his left wrist.

  Tick, tock.

  “We are scant weeks away from a vaccine!” I shouted, “We have a plan in place to keep you safe!” It was no use. Weeks were too long for these people. There was no plan that would calm their frenzied minds. They were terrified of losing their loved ones, terrified of succumbing to a horrible death themselves. I had ripped them from comfort and security only to throw them into chaos. The whole thing was becoming surreal; it was as if I had been thrown into the plot of a movie.

  “STOP!” Gabriel bellowed. I was brought back to earth by the outburst. Every head in the room turned to look at him. I shut my mouth and lowered my arms, stunned in mid sentence by the outburst. Gabriel left his perch and started to make his way through the crowd. It didn’t take much. Groups that had gathered moved themselves out of his way before he got within three feet of them. Being two-hundred and fifty pounds of hulking muscle didn’t hurt. When he reached me, he held out a hand to the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen! I beg your attention! Please! It is imperative that you listen to our leader!” I raised an eyebrow and tried to move away from the one-armed embrace he had caught me in. Something was about to go very wrong. “Now now, Jakey boy,” Gabriel growled at me. “Play nicely. You wouldn’t want me to take all my marbles and go home.”

  “Fine.” It’s not as if I had a choice. The faces of the crowd had settled into contented anticipation. Their expressions reminded me of the way the man in the cafe had calmed after Gabriel touched him in the virtual world. Clearly he had just as much hold over people here, even if his influence was gained through rapport rather than neurotransmitters. What was his ploy going to be now?

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you must bear some patience for this man!” Gabriel resumed his address to the crowd. “He has worked himself to the bone from the very moment he learned of the outbreak! I understand your frustration, I’m worried myself, but this kind of outrage isn’t the answer!” It wasn’t? I couldn’t blame people. If our fortunes had been reversed I would have caught myself up in the same desperation. Hell, I was a little surprised that I hadn’t ended up dead in a shadowy corner of the shelter already. Offering even a glimpse of real solace would be more than enough to get me to listen. I was already screwed.

  “What would you do?” A man who I recognized as one of Gabriel’s fan club shouted. “What would you do if you had won the election, George?”

  Gabriel released me from his grip and spread his hands, a beneficent mountain of a man, bringing his unshak
able peace to the scattered lambs. “I’d honor the will of the people, of course. If it is your wish to return to the virtual world, I would do everything in my power to make that happen.” Shouts of support erupted from the crowd. This was supposed to help me? How? “Now, I think you’ll all understand if I have a private conversation with Mr. Alvaro for a moment. We are both men who have the best interests of the people in mind. I have no doubt that the two of us can work something out. After all, it is only through collaboration that we will survive this crisis.” He turned and pulled me towards him again, showing our backs to the crowd as if we were co-conspirators in a plan not yet revealed. “Here’s the deal, Jacob.” The tone of his voice made a chill run down my spine. It was machinelike, so similar to how he sounded before I unplugged us, that I had to blink hard to bring myself back to the present. “You and I are going to talk here like old friends for just a minute. When I let you turn around again, you’re going to let me make an announcement. You will have this virus under control within three weeks and if you cannot accomplish that, you have agreed to allow me to start reactivating the hibernation pods. Nod if you understand.”

  Damn. Here is was, the culmination of Gabriel’s efforts. if he couldn’t beat me outright, he got others to join him. He took advantage of my lack of control to seed enough distrust that there was nothing I could do. Rather than hopelessness, I felt a perverse relief. Gabriel was leaving me an opening to relieve myself of a horrible burden. After everything, it was tempting to just give in. I could volunteer myself as the first person to plug themselves back in. One quick prick on the arm and I could live out the rest of my days in a little shack by the sea. That is, if Gabriel didn’t just kill me instead.

  By the time it was discovered that Gabriel had manipulated the populace into relinquishing their freedom to him again, I would already be long gone in one way or another. Then I thought of the fate that would actually befall me if I was plugged in to the virtual world again. Gabriel wouldn’t let me live out the remainder of my days peacefully, nor would he grant me the mercy of a quick and painless death. I had committed the ultimate act of defiance and violence against him. If I gave up the fight now I could look forward to as many tortures as his unhinged mind was able to devise before I died. He wouldn’t just take his anger out on me, either. My family would be targeted too. There was no way I would let that happen.

  Filled with renewed defiance, I turned towards him. “You’re a piece of shit, Gabriel. I always knew you had Daddy issues but this is just sad, you know?” I earned a slight growl for that. “You need to face up to the terrible truth.” I wrapped an arm around him as if I were going to embrace him and pulled his face close to mine. “You’re going to have to realize that you too, are mortal.” A flash of something crossed his face then. I wasn’t sure if it was fear or anger, but I knew deep down that I had just sealed my fate. Lose this fight and I was going to lose it all. Family, sanity, and possibly my life. Not necessarily in that order. With no more charades to perform for the crowd, we turned back to the people and I tried very hard not to roll my eyes as he laid his plans out in full. When he was finished thunderous applause broke out in the chamber and he waved.

  The race was on.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Progress was indeed slow going on a vaccine. As we had no immunologists in the shelter we were relying on machinery that most of us hadn’t operated in years to do the job. The virus itself was complex; short of being able to inject industrial disinfectant into a patient’s veins more research was required. As more people fell ill it myself and the medical team decided that it would be wise to distribute a low-level antiviral among the shelter. Our databases said that it had some effectiveness against influenza and if nothing else it would act as a placebo to calm people down.

  After Gabriel’s announcement I had become a de facto social outcast. Salvation beckoned in the form of a return to swimming pools and Sunday mornings at the local cafe. The realization that people would be that quick to give up their freedoms in return for security saddened me. I understood why anyone hungered to sequester themselves from the virus; it was the prospect of what happened afterwards that I had to question whether or not they were thinking of. “Reactivating” Gabriel, or downloading him, whatever the process would entail, was as much of a guarantee of certain death as the disease! How quickly the specter of slaughter at the hands of a machine had been forgotten. Perhaps they hadn’t taken me seriously in the first place.

  Even my own family had abandoned me, choosing to keep as much distance as possible between us. That hurt more than anything else. I suppose I could understand why they did it; they had to keep each other safe. There was a lot of sacrificing yet to be had. But to have the kind of reunion I had always dreamed of only to have them ripped away from me tore at my soul. Instead of breaking the thin shield they had between themselves and social ridicule, I chose to accept my exile. It gave me time to think. As soon as the situation was stabilized I would gather the exploration team. Maybe there would be one or two others who would agree to leave the shelter voluntarily to gather more samples. I reassured myself with the knowledge that the mission would go on, with or without me.

  Gabriel had used my drop in popularity to mobilize his supporters in setting his own plan in motion. HIs ‘inner circle’ had started restoring the hibernation pods and Gabriel’s server room. The good news is that I had wreaked some havoc down there. It didn’t matter if they worked twenty-four hours a day, it would be weeks before they had the place in any kind of order. The pods were easier to repair. Freeing the people from the simulation didn’t cause any physical damage to them, the repairs would be all in the coding. The pods were dependent on the server room which would be useless without the pods.

  My newfound lack of friendly faces didn’t mean that I was relieved of my duties. Every minute of the day was filled with complaints, attempts to undermine me, and requests I had no way of filling. I cursed my father for that. The idea that there should be one person in charge of ‘governing’ a group worked very well when there were only a few hundred of them. One man attempting to govern a thousand was laughable.

  I was bombarded with a hundred questions every day and could offer very little in the way of answers. The former exit team remained my allies, even if they only interacted with me when absolutely necessary. My shunning had one upside to it. Whereas I had been awash in constant human contact since I shut down the simulation, I found myself with an abundance of time alone. Every moment I was not occupying my office it was like everyone else disappeared. In its own way, the isolation worked to calm my nerves.

  As the sickness burned through the shelter, crimes were on the rise. Problems with people hoarding food and supplies were common. I even caught a teenaged boy sneaking out of the infirmary, antibiotics and personal protective equipment stuffed under his shirt. He was sent back to his quarters with a stern warning. The kid was just trying to help his parents out. The Founders had failed to envision a way of life that included a judicial system. The decisions were left to the leader. Under normal circumstances it would be easier to dole out more lenient punishments but the circumstances called for divisive action. Thieves were rewarded with reduced rations for their entire family for the rest of the month. Instances of violence against others resulted in isolation to quarters, the length of time to be determined by the severity of their crime, et cetera. No one was exempt.

  I couldn’t have handed Gabriel a larger boon. He took advantage of the new ‘laws’ to seed dissension through the shelter. Pretty soon I was facing chafing from everyone. What had previously been silent if recalcitrant acceptance morphed into pleas, excuses, and denials. Each day that passed brought me closer to outright rebellion. Trying to maintain the balance between order and chaos wore me down more and more each passing hour. One afternoon after being screamed at for an hour by a woman who insisted that she absolutely needed ten extra servings of preserved rations for her family, I settled on the fact that it was becoming n
ecessary to choose my battles. Punishments for severe transgressions remained the same, but I tried to work with people who committed more minor crimes, if only to gain a better understanding of their circumstances. It didn’t win me any friends but it was an exceptionally good source of data.

  I awoke from a sound sleep gasping and covered in sweat. My nightmare hadn’t been a fantasy or a figment of my mind, it was a memory. I was back in the recreation room, Gabriel’s mobile robot leering over me as I rested my chin on my hands. It was the game where Gabriel had questioned my usefulness as an intelligent being. Instead of paying heed to his comments I blew him off, chalking the conversation up to yet another of Gabriel’s turbulent mood swings. Instead of seeing his lackluster ‘boy next door’ visage reflected in the tablet his face morphed into a snarling mirror of George’s face.

  It’s still a game. The thought popped into my head. This was still a chess game, albeit a large and complex one. The key was to take the emotion out of it and think tactically. Moves, and countermoves. Gabriel wasn’t the all-knowing demigod he made himself out to be. Find the opening in his defense and I wouldn’t just get everyone out of the shelter. I’d defeat Gabriel in a way that he couldn’t possibly recover from. It occurred to me that might not turn out very well for me, but it was time to accept that we were well beyond just my life mattering anymore.

  Chapter Sixteen

  To offer myself a reprieve from the hell I faced every day, I adopted my father’s old habit of wandering the corridors at night. Tonight’s stroll brought me to the shelter’s entrance and I sat down to rest my forehead against the cool steel of the door. Big breath in, slow breath out. The area was so silent my heartbeat was the only sound that met my ears. It made sense why Dad liked to sit out here. I pressed my hands against the concrete flooring and rubbed my thumbs back and forth, feeling the pitting and scratches under the fleshy pads. It was an exercise in grounding. I felt as if I were physically connecting myself with the shelter and each soul in it. The heartbeats of hundreds flowed through this place and though I couldn’t feel them, that knowledge that they were there was reassuring.