Pandora - Contagion

by Eric L. Harry

  “You will have your opportunity to cross,” the Chief Justice replied. “And it’s for this Court to determine what precedent is persuasive. Objection overruled. Proceed.”

  Everyone waited. For Isabel. “Oh, ummm, yes. I testified to that effect. And the judge released her, Emma I mean, from quarantine.”

  “And one of the linchpins of the District Court’s ruling…” the lawyer began.

  “I’m sorry,” his opponent apologized to the Court, reluctantly rising again, “but I have to object. This witness is in no way competent to analyze what grounds underlay an unpublished opinion of a District Court’s habeas ruling.”

  “I’m going to admonish you one last time,” the Chief Justice responded. “Overruled! Counsel, get on with it.”

  But instead of repeating his question, the lawyer questioning Isabel said, “Dr. Miller, you have doubtless noted from the monitor in this courtroom that the president has survived infection with Pandoravirus horribilis, have you not?” Isabel replied that yes, she had noticed that. “In your expert opinion, despite having turned, is Pres. William Stoddard still a human being?”

  Isabel hesitated at the novel way in which the question was phrased. “Well…yes. Of course. He hasn’t transformed genetically into some different…species.”

  “And you assert that to be a scientific fact despite some commentators having taken to calling the Infecteds who turn members of the species Homo insapiens?”

  “That’s just a pejorative term that someone”—Like me!—“made up to describe people suffering deficits due to their brain damage. In order to be a separate species, people would need a different genetic code, as expressed in the DNA contained in almost every cell in their bodies. Therefore, genetically, Pandoravirus victims of course remain members of the species Homo sapiens.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Miller.” The lawyer surveyed the nine justices before returning to his questioning. “Now you mentioned deficits. Please define that term for the Court.”

  “A deficit is an impairment.”

  “A handicap? Like FDR in his wheelchair?”

  “Well, yes, except in the case of Pandoravirus the impairment is cognitive.”

  The lawyer didn’t appear to appreciate her clarification. “A yes or a no will do. So, Dr. Miller, when patients suffer mental impairment, don’t they often experience compensatory improvements in other aspects of cognitive function?” Isabel said that yes, that happens. “And do Pandoravirus victims experience such compensatory enhancements to their brain function?”

  “There’s anecdotal evidence suggesting that Pandoravirus victims who have turned—who have suffered substantial damage to the right hemispheres of their brains—compensate for their loss of abstract thinking by developing additional capacities for logical thinking in their relatively less damaged left hemispheres.”

  “They become more logical, less emotional, like Dr. Spock on Star Trek?”

  “Um, I think that’s Mr. Spock.” A nervous titter rose from the courtroom. “And something like that happens, sometimes, sort of, I suppose. In other cases, however…”

  “Thank you,” the lawyer interrupted, cutting off her attempted foray into the profound dysfunction suffered by substantial percentages of the more severely damaged survivors. Pres. Stoddard didn’t seem as damaged as them. “And do they have a soul?”

  “Pardon me?”

  The lawyer rephrased. “While you were at the NIH hospital in Bethesda, you opined that Pandoravirus victims had lost their self—the ‘ghost in the machine,’ you called it.”

  His opponent could take it no longer. “Perhaps, Mr. Chief Justice, we should just put opposing counsel on the stand and have him give you the testimony he wants.”

  This time, the Chief Justice said, to Isabel’s questioner, “Please do remember that Dr. Miller is the witness, not you. Objection, which you were going to make, sustained.”

  The chastised lawyer to the president asked Isabel, “Do you believe that Pandoravirus destroys the thing we call a self?”

  “Yes, I do. But there’s so much we don’t know about how the amazing plasticity of the brain—its resiliency, malleability, adaptability—might one day develop workarounds that restore some circumscribed sense of self that…”

  “Thank you.” The lawyer wasn’t interested. Isabel was speculating about a neuroscientific development that could possibly have far-reaching, even decisive consequences for mankind. But the lawyer to the president only heard the two words “one day.” He was concerned only with right now. “And this thing—the self—in what part of the brain does it reside?”

  She opened her mouth to speak. But before she could get her somewhat complex answer out, the lawyer ‘man-splained’ it for her.

  “As I understand it, there’s the brain, and the mind. The brain is obvious. It’s that gray mass that sits in our crania between our ears. But the location of the mind is in doubt, is it not?”

  “As I was about to say, it’s an age-old question, the mind-brain duality. Some people think that the mind is like software that runs on hardware—the brain.”

  “So, the mind, or the self, is the ghost in the machine?” Isabel confirmed his understanding, sort of, with a nod modified by a shrug. “And what proof do we have that that the mind actually exists?”

  “There is no proof, really. It’s just a common, shared perception. But there is another school of thought that consciousness is merely an artifact. Something that doesn’t actually exist, but is conjured up to explain our everyday experience.”

  “And so consciousness—a self, a mind—is just a construct manufactured by our brains out of thin air?”

  “That’s a theory,” Isabel replied.

  “Do you subscribe to that theory?”

  “I’m not sure.” The lawyer abruptly walked away from the witness stand and said, in a booming voice, “Now, Dr. Miller, switching subjects…”

  “Hold on there, counsel,” interrupted one of the previously silent Associate Justices, a frail looking elderly lady whose name Isabel couldn’t recall. “Dr. Miller, you said you’re not sure. You’re not sure about what, exactly?”

  “I used to believe, ma’am, like most modern neuroscientists, in conscious inessentialism. That all activities undertaken in the cognitive domain can be explained by the natural functioning of the physical brain without resorting to the more convoluted explanation that there’s some separate thinking entity inside each of us, looking out at the world, watching the ‘theater of the mind.’”

  “But you don’t believe that anymore?”

  Isabel looked at the president, who stared blankly back at the camera, and at the First Lady, who leaned forward on both elbows and was boring holes into Isabel with her stare.

  “No, I don’t think I do,” Isabel answered.

  “So, ergo, you now think,” the same associate justice asked, “that there is something to the concept of a self, or a soul, or a ghost in the machine?”

  Without meaning too, Isabel sighed. “This is just my opinion…”

  “That’s why we certify experts,” the associate justice interrupted. “To give us their presumably more informed opinions. So what is your opinion, Dr. Miller?”

  Isabel paused to compose her thoughts, which had the unintended consequence of heightening the significance of her reply. “The whole point of conscious inessentialism is that, if you can imagine a person, called a philosopher’s zombie, who has no consciousness whatsoever but still behaves in exactly the same way as you and I, then consciousness would not have evolved, because natural selection operates only on traits that affect behavior.”

  The associate justice looked at her brethren before saying, “I’m sorry, but if there was an answer in there—an opinion about whether or not consciousness is real—I didn’t hear it.”

  Isabel looked apologetically at the First Lady. “The beh
avior of Pandoravirus victims is markedly different from the behavior of the Uninfected. So that thought exercise I described, where you assumed identical behavior—by one person with a self, and another without one—is irrelevant. Whether you call the change in Infecteds deficits resulting from physiological alterations to the structure of the brain, or alternatively the death of the self, doesn’t matter. Infecteds and Uninfecteds are not the same. Their behavior is different.”

  “No more questions,” the president’s lawyer said icily and abruptly.

  “Does counsel to the Respondent have any questions?”

  “Oh, yes I do, Mr. Chief Justice,” said the energized lawyer to Vice Pres. Anderson, rising and buttoning his jacket. “I most certainly do. Thank you.”

  The president’s lawyer began a whispered and heated exchange with the First Lady. Pres. Stoddard on his monitor scratched his nose. The vice president’s counsel stepped up to Isabel. “And thank you, Dr. Miller, for appearing here. I know of your prior service during this crisis, and I applaud the sense of duty that brought you before this Court today. And I also understand how close you have been to the First Family, and how difficult this hearing must be for you.”

  The lawyer wasn’t speaking to her. He was reminding the nine justices that Isabel had been called as his opposition’s expert, despite her testimony helping his case. “As I understand it, you believe that when someone survives infection with Pandoravirus, the brain damage that he or she suffers results in substantial behavioral changes.”

  “Objection!” said counsel to the president. “He’s leading the witness.”

  “He’s cross-examining her,” the Chief Justice replied in apparent extreme annoyance. “She’s your witness.”

  “Do you remember the question?” the patient vice president’s lawyer asked.

  “Yes. And the answer is yes. Their behavior changes substantially.”

  “Thank you. Now,” the lawyer said, beginning to pace the room, “as you are aware, the issue before this Court is whether or not the current president is competent to continue in his office. The vice president and a majority of the president’s cabinet…”

  “Objection!” said the president’s counsel, bolting to his feet.

  The Chief Justice instantly sustained the objection. “I will not warn you again, Mr. Solicitor-General. You are not to introduce, before this or any other witness, the opinion of others regarding the competence or lack thereof of the president.”

  The lawyer gave the Court an exaggerated, deferential nod. But Isabel now knew that the vice president and the Cabinet had voted the president out, and that the president—the Petitioner who had requested this hearing—was fighting that decision. Or the First Lady was, on his behalf.

  “Dr. Miller,” the solicitor-general resumed, “you are familiar, generally speaking, with the complexity of the job of President of the United States of America? With the myriad decisions, large and small, that constitute a day-in-the-life of this nation’s commander-in-chief?”

  Isabel said, “Yes. Sure. Generally speaking.”

  “And during an emergency such as this one—an existential crisis that has gripped every citizen of our nation, and indeed of the entire world, in a life-and-death struggle with an apocalyptic plague—would you not expect that the decisions this country relies upon its president to make are not only more complex, more novel, and more difficult, but also far, far more momentous in their importance?”

  The president’s counsel held out his arms in supplication and began to rise. “Overruled!” the Chief Justice said before the man could even speak.

  Everyone waited. Isabel said, “I’m sure it’s an extremely demanding job, yes.”

  “And your testimony today has been that the person on whom we currently rely to make decisions that affect the fate of our nation, of our entire species, is suffering from mental deficits that cause his behavior to deviate substantially from the norm?” Isabel gave him a sheepish yes. “And by altered behavior, do you mean that some of the decisions that the man elected to this office might have made before infection can now be expected to be decided differently today, after his infection, as a direct result of his brain damage?”

  The First Lady’s gaze was riveted on Isabel. But she couldn’t lie. “I’m afraid so.”

  The lawyer was nodding, encouraging her. It felt like betrayal even though her answers were the God’s-honest-truth and the president didn’t seem to care in the least that she was stabbing him in the back. “And whether that’s due to the death of Pres. Stoddard’s self, or just the cumulative effect of his post-infection mental handicaps, the president is not the same man who was elected to his office, would you agree?”

  Isabel licked her dry lips and swallowed. “Uhm, I guess I would, yes. Agree.”

  “No more questions,” the satisfied lawyer said, thanking her as she was dismissed by the Chief Justice. She cast one last glance at the First Lady and was met with complete indifference. Isabel was dead to Angela Stoddard now. Just another in what must have been a series of betrayals that had led to this hearing. From the president’s lack of any reaction at all on the television monitor, she was also dead to him, but in a different and much more profound way.

  Gen. Browner dipped his head in acknowledgement as Isabel passed. The Directors of the CIA and FBI both avoided eye contact. “Counsel to the Respondent,” the vice president’s lawyer said, “would like to call, as our expert witness, Dr. Henry Rosenbaum.”

  The door opened just as Isabel reached it, and Hank Rosenbaum entered. Hank had lied to her to trick her into participating in an NIH twins study with her infected sister. All her ill feelings toward the man came flooding back. They exchanged the briefest of nods on passing. Rosenbaum would surely demolish any shred of a case left to the president…to the extent Isabel hadn’t already. The Supreme Court would probably end up declaring Infecteds to be non-human, and it would be open season on all of them, Emma included.

  The Secret Service agent who had brought Isabel there waited for her outside the metal building. Isabel only then remembered that she was in a cave. Somehow, the venue seemed appropriate. It was probably in caves that mankind’s morality and ethics had first emerged. It was fitting that they would also be discarded in a cave.

  Browner called out to her as she was putting her pack and rifle back into the Humvee. He asked for privacy, and the soldiers and Secret Service agent gave them space. “Thank you for your honesty in there. I know your feelings for your sister, and for the First Family. That must have been difficult.”

  “So, we’re going to start impulsive eradication?”

  Gen. Browner didn’t hedge. “The vice president agreed with that policy. But the vaccine changes things.”

  “Are you going to kill the president?”

  “Good God, no. We’ll find a place for him to live out his days. That may seem inconsistent with…what is coming, but now that we have a vaccine we don’t need to eradicate all Infecteds. We no longer have to fear extinction. We just need to defeat them militarily. Not genocide; war. I take it, however, that you still don’t even agree with that?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know what I believe anymore. I just want all this to be over.”

  Browner wore a sympathetic expression. “The times do test one’s faith. In God. In mankind. In institutions and principles.”

  But Isabel’s concern was more practical. “If you start exterminating them, their logical response will be to start exterminating us.”

  “They’re already doing that. We’ll just be going all-in on our side.”

  “And do you think we’ll win if we do?”

  The Marine regarded her for a moment before replying, “I can’t say that I do. The deck is stacked against us. It’s going to take a lot longer than Stoddard suggested in his speech to manufacture mass quantities of the vaccine. And the Infecteds seem to be organizing mo
re rapidly than we expected. But we have to try. We can’t just give up on art, literature, scientific achievement. They won’t have any of those things. They’ve got no spark, no creativity. They may keep farms and factories going, but they won’t write War and Peace, or compose Beethoven’s Ninth, or paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.”

  “No,” Isabel said with a loud sigh, “they won’t. That’s all inessential.”

  An officer summoned Browner. “Duty calls,” the Marine general said to Isabel. “You’ve been a true patriot. We’re falling back to what surveys suggest may be a defensible corridor from the Port of Houston and its petrochemical and refinery complex, up to the Denver/Boulder area. We could use your continued assistance.” Browner waited, then took her silence as a no. “Well, if there’s ever anything I can do for you, please let me know.”

  Isabel considered asking him how it was that the anti-war president was so conveniently one of the eight people who got sick from the inoculations on the plane…but she didn’t. What would’ve been the point?

  It was time to think about survival of her self. “I do have one favor I’d like to ask.”

  Chapter 39

  THE SHENANDOAH VALLEY

  Infection Date 63, 1530 GMT (11:30 a.m. Local)

  “I think I hit one behind that big dead tree,” Chloe whispered to her father, pointing. Noah radioed his intentions to Natalie and Jake, who covered them from the tower.

  Their plan for daily target practice had been overtaken by hourly attacks. Natalie was learning how to shoot on the job. “We don’t see anything moving,” she replied in a low crackle.

  When they got to the thick trunk of the fallen tree, they found a smallish rifle and a crimson pool that still glinted in the sunlight. Like an Indian tracker, Noah searched for and found droplets and drag marks leading downhill. He moved from cover to cover as he followed the blood trail. Chloe took up each position he abandoned, her AR-15 at the ready and her face frozen in a cringe that Noah, by now, recognized as meaning ready-to-kill. These nearly continuous attacks on their compound were taking a huge toll on everyone. It was a relentless grind of sleeplessness and stress punctuated by sudden onslaughts of fear and trauma. Everyone waited for their luck to run out. No one was more sick in anticipation of that happening than Noah.