The Barrier

by Shankari Chandran

  ‘There have been three other breaches,’ Hackman said.

  Breaches.

  ‘In Bangladesh, Pakistan and Assam. In all cases, the vaccinators we interrogated cited two common factors: an energy or an “It” that made them do it, and a ghost that supplied the decoy vaccine. We think it’s the same ghost.’

  ‘And the same It – you believe the “why”, don’t you?’ Noah shook his head in disgust.

  ‘I do, and I’m not the only one. People above me have looked at the recordings and they believe these people are telling the truth, at least in their own minds. They believe they are being guided to do this by a higher power. Watch the other recordings. The vaxxers all talk about an energy that’s enlightening them about the vaccine we’re using in the East.’

  ‘An omniscient energy with exceptional technical expertise?’ Noah asked. ‘Why didn’t it tell them how to create a proper Ebola vaccine then, without the other active ingredient? They would maintain herd immunity against Ebola in the East, the same as us. And, like us, they would be free from the Faith Inhibitor.’

  The Faith Inhibitor. FI-85. Sometimes Noah still couldn’t believe what they had done. What his father would have thought of it. The Faith Inhibitor targeted and damaged the part of the human brain that generated faith. People stopped feeling faith. They stopped yearning for and seeking a loving, vengeful and powerful God. A Memory Inhibitor was also added to the vaccine so that people no longer remembered the ancient, lost ideas.

  Religion. The Sixth Virus. The virus of the East. As an agent of the Western Alliance, Noah had been there during the Great Purge when the West made sure that all reminders of religion were excoriated from the East. From cities, temples and even its people.

  Sometimes Noah thought it was ironic that he lived in the Western Alliance where people could still feel faith, and yet, these days, he felt nothing.

  Hackman swung himself out of his chair and stood up. ‘First rule of Sunday School: God helps those who help themselves. Right now, the ghost or whoever’s supplying this decoy, doesn’t have the strain he needs to create an Ebola vaccine. No one does except us. Which is why we produce the vaccine for both the West and the East.’

  ‘We don’t produce it,’ Noah corrected. ‘Your drug lord buddies at Abre de Libre Pharmaceuticals produce it.’

  ‘Play nice,’ Hackman replied.

  ‘You don’t pay me to be nice.’

  ‘I suppose that’s right.’ Hackman nodded. ‘Right now, all this ghost can do is study the existing vaccine that we supply, and create a decoy without the Faith Inhibitors.’

  Noah shook his head in confusion. He stood up. ‘How does the ghost know about the Faith Inhibitor? Who told him?’

  Hackman looked at him for a moment and then replied. ‘If you believe Hassan – God told him.’

  Chapter 5

  Noah left Hackman’s office with the access codes to a high-level data server. His boss’s final words to him were: ‘This is a long one. Before you start, I want you to get some sleep. At the very least go out tonight, get drunk, find some beautiful, bookish woman with red-brown hair, and fuck her brains out. When was the last time you did that? You look like you need it.’

  He took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out. The car was still waiting for him. He knocked on the window.

  ‘I’ll walk, thank you,’ he said to the car’s driver-unit.

  ‘You sure, sir?’ The unit replied with the standard Texan accent of all recent models.

  ‘Positive. I need some fresh air.’ He waved his face mask at the car.

  The driver-unit laughed.

  He walked along the Thames back towards New Waterloo station, heading east, following the old stone wall that hugged the river. The Thames gleamed blue against the bright morning sky.

  There was a time, during the Great Pandemic, when families dropped their dead into the waterways. The mortuaries, hospitals and funeral homes couldn’t keep up with the body count. Neither could the school halls and stadiums. People disposed of their loved ones in their own way. The river had never carried Ebola, but the decomposing bodies brought colonies of other diseases.

  The Thames was unrecognisably clean now, pumped with several levels of cleansers: chlorine compounds, antibacterial and antiviral agents, antibiotics and anti-protozoa medications. After WWR, Bio’s Sanitation Division took control of the waterways. The Thames, like all of Britain’s rivers, was full of mutagens. If you could afford to eat fish, it had been raised in tanks the size of football fields, on industrial farms.

  Noah sat on a bench under the shadow of London Bridge, its recently rebuilt steel towers rising sharply into the sky.

  Sometimes he imagined that Sera was with him. He sat and talked to her. They fed the pigeons together and laughed as the birds fought over the scraps.

  ‘Don’t tell Mummy I gave away her sandwich,’ he whispers.

  ‘I promise. Daddy, do you think the pigeons will give it to their babies?’ she asks.

  ‘Of course,’ he replies. ‘Everyone loves to feed their babies. You eat some too, sweetheart,’ he says, tearing her a strip.

  Sometimes he just sat there and cried.

  He checked his watch: 1.23 pm. He looked up and smiled. Maggie was always early. He stood up and reached out for her automatically. She turned her face so he could kiss her cheek.

  ‘You’ve cut your hair. It looks great. You look great.’ He put his hands in his pockets. Her hair was boyish, her features made sharper by it.

  ‘You look exhausted. When did you get back?’ she asked.

  ‘This morning. Thanks for coming to see me.’

  ‘You don’t have to thank me. How are you?’

  ‘Okay. You?’ He motioned to the bench. She sat reluctantly. He took a seat with her but not too close.

  ‘Okay.’ She paused, looking out at the bridge. ‘Why this bench, Noah? There are benches closer to Bio, or closer to my office – why do we always meet at this one?’

  ‘This one . . . London Bridge reminds me of the price of safety.’

  She laughed at him. A harsh, empty laugh. ‘It reminds most people of the nursery rhyme.’

  ‘How’s work going? I heard you’re back at Repop.’ Maggie was a scientist at the Department of Repopulation.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘Come on, Maggie – I haven’t seen you in four months. I just . . . I just want to know how you are.’

  ‘You want to know now? After we divorced?’

  ‘Maggie –’

  ‘Work’s great, Noah. It keeps my mind off things. We’re reviewing a new product – it’s a fertility scanner. It tracks the movement of the egg from the ovary to the uterus and identifies the precise date and time for conception. It’s portable and slimline too. You can fit it in your handbag. You know, in case you need to conceive on the go.’

  ‘Does it come with a payment plan and a free set of steak knives if I order now?’

  She smiled. ‘Just six months of free fertility booster supplements. Repop is very interested in it – I think the manufacturer will pass the approvals process.’

  ‘Do you ever think about –’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ She answered quickly. ‘Noah, I came here to . . .’ She opened her handbag, ‘To return this to you.’ It was his wedding ring. ‘You have to stop giving it to me.’

  He looked at the ring but didn’t take it. ‘I’ve been assigned again. I want you to keep it for me until I get back.’

  ‘We’re not married anymore.’

  ‘I know, it’s just that – you know what it is.’

  Before he went on a job, he had to take off his ring and place it on her side-table. He had to kiss her goodbye and say, ‘Don’t lose that, I’ll need it when I get back.’

  ‘It’s a sweet ritual, Noah, but it’s not us anymore.’

  ‘I have to do it, Maggie . . . to be sure I’ll return.’

  ‘God damn you,’ she whispered and shook her head. ‘You have no right to make me r
esponsible for that. We are not a part of each other anymore.’ There were tears in her eyes.

  He looked out over the river. You will always be a part of me. Say it, he cursed himself. You will always be a part of me. You and Sera.

  ‘Please, Maggie – just one more time. The last time.’ He closed her hand around the ring.

  ‘It’s never the last time with you.’ She tried to pull away but he held onto her.

  ‘If you don’t take it, I’ll have to break into your apartment and leave it on your new side-table.’

  She laughed in spite of herself and pulled back harder. ‘That’s illegal and creepy.’

  ‘That’s me,’ he smiled. She was so beautiful. He wanted to touch her.

  She put the ring in her bag. ‘Be safe, Noah.’ She kissed him on the cheek and stood up before he could do more. She walked away, facing straight ahead. He could tell she was crying.

  He looked at the bridge again.

  London Bridge is falling down, falling down, he hummed.

  In 2022, London Bridge had fallen down, just like the nursery rhyme. When the Great Ebola Pandemic had reached London, the government shut the city off from the rest of the country in the hope the virus would burn itself out. London’s beautiful bridges, which spread like the fingers of a hand, were broken by four jets and ten missiles. The result: 29,734 casualties and 18,956 fatalities. People desperately trying to escape across the bridges before the cordon was dropped.

  They didn’t have a chance. They screamed and ran. They crushed each other. They jumped into the grey water with their children.

  He had watched it from the safety of New York. The television flashed scenes from a movie. He sat in his kitchen, his father reaching for his hand. Tears in both their eyes. He had seen the people go under.

  He had prayed for their heads to reappear. He saw the bridges snap and fall on top of them.

  The virus didn’t burn itself out. It found a way – Ebola always found a way – and it was carried across the country and beyond.

  ‘The truth is, Maggie,’ he said to the empty bench, ‘I like to sit here because it reminds me that life jogs on. I watch people. They go past me, their minds and memories never stopping at the bridge or the sound of the parents screaming or the children crying.

  ‘I like that people can run past this bridge and feel nothing. I am intrigued by it.

  ‘I resent it too.’

  He stood up and stretched in the midday sun, his body still stiff from the plane trip. People were emerging from office blocks in their running gear. He headed towards the nearest tube entrance, pulling his face mask from his pocket and then shoving it away, as he descended into the tube’s mouth.

  *

  He dropped his bag by the front door of his apartment. It wasn’t good to be back, but it was familiar. He ignored the flashes on his answering machine. They were either from his mother or his drycleaner. He turned on the television and flicked through the public health channels, until he found the cooking channel Maggie liked. He left it on and walked away.

  After a quick shower, he took out a Deca-Vit syringe from the fridge and checked its expiry date – it was three weeks past.

  ‘Danger is my middle name,’ he said, cracking open the seal. The daily cocktail of vitamins was supposed to be taken with food but he didn’t feel like a shake.

  He flicked through the mail indifferently and then threw the pile on his desk. It splayed out like a fan, knocking a photo frame off the edge.

  ‘Shit.’ He bent down and picked it up, resisting the sudden temptation to hold its cold, glass façade to his chest. It was a photograph of Maggie, him and the baby at the hospital. Their first family photo.

  He remembered holding his daughter when she emerged into the world, her eyes squinting in the light, her face puckered and angry. She was so ugly and so beautiful. He held her, terrified he would hurt her with his hands roughened by years of hurting others. Carefully, he touched the curve of her head, inside which would come to rest all the feelings, hopes and memories that life would give his child.

  Life had been selfish.

  He would have given her all the rest of his days if he could have. These empty, endless days he spent extracting information, watching people, catching them. Killing them.

  He whispered the name they had chosen. Seraphina. Sera. Like the angel.

  ‘There are forty-four small plates of bone,’ he said to his exhausted wife. Ex-wife. Maggie smiled at the quirk she used to love.

  ‘Really? Do tell, because now is really the time.’ She closed her eyes against the hospital pillow.

  ‘They will harden and fuse eventually, but for now they’re held together by the connective tissue. See?’ He leaned closer to her with their baby and she opened her eyes.

  ‘At the top, here.’ He motioned to the anterior fontanelle. ‘This space can remain soft and open for her first eighteen months. Look closely, you can count her heart rate.’

  He stroked her sticky tufts of dark hair and found the strong pulse in the gap between the bones. He felt her life beat in that place.

  Noah put the photograph down. Face down.

  Chapter 6

  Noah held onto the wall of the lift as it descended into the earth.

  A digitised female voice announced each subterranean level of the Bio Building as the lift dropped. Noah felt like he was plunging deeper into water that was pressing on his body and fogging his hearing. The lift door opened at Subterranean 16 and his inner ear equalised – the main body of the building was pressure controlled.

  He entered the prep room for a laboratory. A protective suit hung on a locker, bearing his name on a post-it note. He liked these new suits. They fitted well, like a reinforced outer skin.

  At the entrance to the lab he punched in a passcode and the seal of the door opened reluctantly, lips pulled apart mid-kiss. He felt the cool air of the lab through the suit.

  The room was equipped with microscopes, computers and refrigerator units with security panels. At one end, Dr Jack Neeson peered into a microscope as tall as Noah, with a series of lenses stacked above it, like the perspex bellows of a church organ. Neeson was dressed only in trousers, a collared shirt and a white lab coat. Without lifting his face from the eyepiece, he issued commands.

  ‘Objective lens 1000XR, please.’

  A mechanical arm that Noah hadn’t noticed before unfurled itself from the ceiling. With precise fine motor skills, it exchanged the lenses in the microscope. The spider-fingers of the hand pincered the condenser lens and adjusted the angle and light of the illuminator, anticipating the scientist’s physical orientation.

  ‘It’s incredible, isn’t it? It’s a hybrid of the LightCycler and the nano-microscope. Has both functions with spectacular resolution. Even the electron microscope is integrated into it. Everything I see is recorded by her computer,’ the man said, finally raising his head. ‘And she’s completely un-hackable: she has her own server and firewall. She’s not even networked to Bio.’

  The mechanical arm swung forward to wipe the sweat from his brow. ‘Roberta, say hello to Noah.’

  ‘Hello Noah,’ a female voice said.

  ‘Her voice box is in a hard drive behind the arm,’ Neeson pointed vaguely. ‘But I’ve connected it to the lab speakers so it sounds like she’s everywhere.’

  ‘She has a lovely voice,’ Noah said.

  ‘Thank you,’ replied both Neeson and the computer. ‘Admit it,’ Neeson continued, ‘she’s alarmingly sexy.’

  Noah laughed. ‘That’s because you’ve always found smart sexy, and yes I am alarmed.’

  ‘I have an IQ of 192,’ Roberta confirmed.

  ‘I feel overdressed, Neese.’ Noah indicated the other man’s lack of protective suit.

  ‘You’re suited up for legal reasons and the cameras. I find the colour makes me look pale.’

  ‘You never leave the lab – you are pale.’

  Neeson ignored him. ‘I’m just admiring your new vaccine.’ He took
off his plastic gloves and reached forward.

  Noah smiled and shook the older man’s hand. Neeson clasped his arm for a moment longer.

  ‘Did you read those journal articles I sent you?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re on a list –’

  ‘With all the other articles I sent you?’ Neeson shook his head.

  ‘Tell me about the vaccine,’ Noah asked.

  ‘It’s beautiful, perfectly formed, deceptive and able to emulate Nature and Nature’s expectations. I think I’m in love.’

  ‘You know I find it creepy when you talk about micro-organisms like that.’

  ‘I’ve named her Martha Rose, after my mother. I’ve been saving her name for something special.’

  Noah laughed again. ‘Thanks for your preliminary report. It helped with the interrogation. The vaxxer – Hassan Ali – said he didn’t develop the vaccine himself.’

  ‘He didn’t – we’re looking at the work of an exceptional virologist. The decoy produced the right markers enabling it to fool the scanners. But it did it without producing functional antibodies or without damaging the faith centre.

  ‘The scanners in the West look for Ebola antibody markers in human blood serum. The scanners in the East are programmed to look for two types of markers: the Ebola antibody markers and the Faith Inhibitor markers.’

  ‘Programmed by Abre de Libre?’ Noah asked. ‘Or Bio?’

  ‘Good question. The scanner settings are regulated by the Department for Biological Integrity – we are a governmental organisation after all and the immunity status of the population is a public health matter . . .’

  ‘But?’ Noah prompted.

  ‘But Abre de Libre calibrates and controls the actual machines,’ Neeson replied reluctantly.

  ‘They control the scanners and the vaccine production?’

  Neeson nodded. ‘It’s a good thing they’re on our side.’

  ‘I suspect it’s a good thing we’re on their side.’

  ‘Ah, Noah, so much cynicism in one so young.’

  ‘I’m not that young anymore,’ Noah replied.

  ‘Let Roberta look at your brain, she can identify the debilitation of age and abuse.’