The Barrier

by Shankari Chandran

  Noah looked at Khan, shocked. Devi was the Hindu Supreme Mother Goddess.

  ‘Of course you won’t know Sri Devi – she was a Bollywood superstar.’ He laughed. ‘Devi – prepare the Ebola outbreak photographs, please. Screen on,’ Khan instructed.

  Noah watched in amazement as a robotic hand whirred around the room.

  ‘She’s tidying up first,’ Khan whispered proudly.

  Garner’s voice spoke in his earpiece: ‘This is the AILA Reina. Just bringing up its development history now, sir.’ She paused, obviously scrolling through information as she accessed it. ‘Okay. It’s not as advanced as Dr Neeson’s. This is an older test model. It was taken offline because its nanoscope resolution wasn’t good enough for –’

  ‘Got it,’ Noah spoke out loud, cutting her off.

  ‘Of course, sir, sorry. Like Dr Neeson’s, it’s not networked. If Khan’s using the AILA to make the decoy vaccine I’m not sure I can hack into it – at all.’

  Noah nodded. Garner could see everything through his contact lenses.

  ‘Where did you get Devi from, Dr Khan?’

  ‘Please, you must call me Amir. We are colleagues, explorers with microscopes. This beauty,’ he stroked the side of the machine, ‘was a gift from one of our corporate investors. The accuracy of her finger movements is based on thousands of hours of research and the robotic emulations of bombmakers.’

  ‘Bombmakers?’

  ‘Yes, those fellows have exceptional fine motor precision. They never make a mistake.’

  ‘Until they do and they blow themselves up.’

  ‘Quite the pessimist, aren’t you?’

  Noah laughed. ‘It’s beautiful. So is your lab, Dr – Amir. I’m impressed.’

  ‘No, you are surprised. What were you expecting? That we would be sterilising our equipment with a Bunsen burner instead of an autoclave?’ He laughed. ‘I’m very happy to disappoint your expectations and perhaps create new ones about the kind of science we do here in Colombo. Our laboratory is state-of-the-art.’

  Khan led him around the room. ‘We take disease prevention seriously – and our obligation to protect the global herd. In Sri Lanka we still carry the burden of guilt for our role in the war – we take our share of responsibility for what happened.’

  ‘That was in the past,’ Noah replied.

  ‘Perhaps, but it’s important to remember the past and to learn from it. Now all of this –’ Khan waved his arms at the laboratory around him ‘– this is the future, surely? Where science is the new philosophy and scientists the new philosophers. Let me show you what you came for.

  ‘Come, come – bring your own chair. These images are from Devi’s electron microscope.’

  Noah looked up at the screen on the wall. He recognised the image immediately. It was Ebola Strain 48.6, the virus that Neeson had engineered for the hospital outbreak.

  ‘I’ve never seen it before,’ Khan said. ‘It’s almost identical to Ebola 47. People who were fully vaccinated with EBL-47 were immune to it. But one codon within a protein has changed, here, Noah, an intelligent design . . .’ He pointed to a section. ‘It’s hyper-functional – an outstanding killer.’

  As a weapon, it was risky but effective. Neeson had said the hosts would not survive and neither would the virus – this strain would burn itself out quickly, assuming that the hospital’s lockdown procedures were efficient. Hackman knew about the drills. He’d won this round.

  ‘Baby Karthik was the one who sounded the alarm,’ Khan continued.

  ‘What was his full name?’ Noah asked. It was important to remember the names of his dead. ‘The patient files only refer to him as Baby Karthik.’

  ‘His full name is Karthik Raghavan. After the war, babies and children in Sri Lankan hospitals are only ever identified by their first name and a barcode on their ankles,’ Khan replied.

  ‘Why is that?’ Noah turned away from the screen, towards the old man.

  ‘During World War R . . .’ Khan chose his words carefully. The lab was watched, but it was more than that. He was picking through words and images. ‘Some factions were given a . . . legitimacy by the state – an official mandate to hurt . . .’ He looked hard at Noah, as if deciding whether he could trust him with a more accurate word: ‘To massacre people who were not like them. Others, those that were different, had no such legitimacy. Only the desperation of self-defence. Neither side was less vicious . . .’ His voice and mind drifted inward to the memory of an old violence.

  ‘The babies, Doctor –’ Noah prompted.

  ‘Ah yes, the babies. I’m sorry.’ Khan took his glasses off and pressed his thumb into the space between his eye and his brow bone.

  He has a migraine again, Noah thought. Persistent. Mild squint forming in the left eye. The familiar inventory of symptoms hurt him somewhere in the base of his chest. He waited for Khan to speak.

  ‘You see, during World War R, mobs came to the hospitals. They took the patient charts and walked the hallways.’ He put his glasses back on. They were smudged but he didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘They went from ward to ward with the charts and attacked patients, based on their surnames. No matter how sick they were. They dragged them from operating tables. And ripped them from their mother’s arms, from their cribs and their incubators. They took them down to the front lawn – there is a memorial there now but the grass doesn’t seem to grow, no matter how hard they try. They took all the patients there. The lucky ones were beheaded . . .’

  ‘The others?’ Noah whispered. He had to ask.

  ‘They covered them in petrol and set fire to them.’

  Khan shook his head but the image stayed with them both.

  ‘What does a name tell you? It’s our actions that tell us who we are – and babies, well – they’ve not had a chance to . . . do anything.’

  ‘But you don’t label children by their surnames anymore?’ Noah prompted. Even though the violence had ended and the vaccine in the East would stop it from ever beginning again.

  ‘No – it’s a tradition, I suppose. A way of remembering our past . . . we use their first name and the barcode. We don’t want children to be classified by their last name. They are simply children.’

  Simply children.

  Khan stood up abruptly. ‘Come, let me introduce you to my monkeys.’ He led Noah to an antechamber. ‘I presume you brought your own PPE?’

  Noah nodded.

  Once Khan and Noah were suited up in their personal protective equipment, Khan opened another door to the isolation room. They were assaulted by a chorus of angry cries and the smell of faeces from a row of monkeys in cages.

  ‘Chh, cch –’ Khan whispered to them. ‘They’ve been very nervous lately. They’re not stupid.’

  ‘You injected them with the virus sample?’ Noah asked.

  ‘I did. I tried it on the tissue cultures first but, as I mentioned, the virus invaded the cells and destroyed them too quickly. I barely had time to observe its progress, let alone play with it.’ He poked a finger through a cage and tickled under a monkey’s chin. The animal calmed down and lay back, giving Khan his tummy. He laughed softly.

  ‘Aisha, my wife, hated experimenting on them. She treated them like her children. She used to cry when they died, which in our line of work, is unfortunately quite often.’

  ‘What happened when you injected the virus into them?’ Noah asked.

  Khan kept walking past the other cages, some empty, some not. He stopped at the back of the room, at a large glass tank, much like the humidicribs used for premature babies.

  ‘This is what happened.’ Inside the tank, a monkey lay curled into the foetal position, its chest rising and falling in rapid, shallow breaths. Black blood pooled around its eyes, nose and mouth.

  ‘This is the last one. It’s almost over, little one.’ Khan reached into the tank with his gloved hands and stroked the animal. It shuddered and then relaxed.

  ‘They all died within thirty-six hours of displayi
ng the same symptoms as the human victims. They looked like they had a really bad flu for eight hours before they presented with the signs of rapid multi-system failure. I’ve recorded everything – including the Haema Scans. Devi is mobile, so she worked with me here and we took bloods every hour, sometimes every twenty minutes.’

  ‘Why?’ Noah asked.

  ‘Why did I take bloods?’ Khan asked, confused.

  ‘Why did you infect the monkeys with the virus? The WHO Protocol requires you to contain and destroy it, not perpetuate it. What are you doing with their blood?’ There were any number of things Khan could do with a live sample of Ebola 48.6.

  ‘I’m studying it – the virus adapts rapidly within the host, adjusting to its strengths and finding better ways to kill it. But the patients all produced antibodies before they were overwhelmed by it. If we can understand the virus and the body’s immune response, we can create a vaccine of course,’ Khan replied.

  ‘I need another end-stage blood sample. The last antibodies are the best. Put your hands here, Noah. Hold his shoulders down – be ready, he might fight me.’ He moved over so Noah could position his hands on the dying animal.

  He braced himself just in time – the monkey thrashed with its last energy, screaming and coughing blood, curling its lips back and baring yellow teeth. Khan plunged the syringe into its atrophied thigh and filled it with thick blood.

  The monkey snapped its powerful jaws at Noah. He felt its teeth graze his glove, a putrid liquid spray towards him. Khan pushed him out of the way and dropped the syringe.

  Noah checked his gloves and protection equipment, his heart racing. It was all intact. He exhaled and looked at Khan.

  ‘You’re bleeding!’ Noah grabbed the older man’s arm and held it tightly. ‘You’re bleeding,’ he repeated. Khan’s glove was torn. Blood seeped through.

  ‘We need to quarantine you.’ He didn’t let go.

  ‘We don’t need to do anything.’

  ‘The WHO Protocol –’

  Khan interrupted him. ‘I know what the protocol says.’ He pulled himself free and picked up the portable Haema Scanner. ‘Scan me,’ he held the machine out to Noah. ‘Scan me. Check my blood and then decide.’

  ‘You’ve been bitten by an animal infected with Ebola – I don’t need to scan you. I need to quarantine you before you become infectious.’

  ‘Scan me, Noah,’ Khan repeated calmly, pulling back his protective clothing.

  Noah held the scanner above his wrist. The reading was normal. He checked its setting and scanned Khan again. It was clear. He did it a third time – it showed the blood work of a man with the right antibody markers and no Ebola contamination.

  ‘I’m fine, Noah. The scanners never lie.’

  *

  Khan sealed the plastic body bag around the monkey, took his gloves off and made a phone call.

  ‘I need a clean-up team. Bio Hazard Grade 1 – now, thank you.’ He put the phone down.

  ‘You should be dying.’ Noah shook his head.

  ‘We’re all dying. Life kills us from the day we are born, and yet we are still so surprised by death. So unready. I’m fine, Noah. I’m merely using one organism to explore and improve the behaviour of another organism. I’m trialling a vaccine for this new strain – the blood serum from the monkeys helps me tailor it.’

  ‘You’re trialling it on yourself?’ Noah whispered.

  ‘I’m prepared to back myself, yes. It’s a promising vaccine. I’ll show it to you soon, if you like.’ Khan stopped, framing his words carefully again. ‘This body, like cancer, is just a group of cells.’

  ‘Cancer is much more than that.’

  ‘No, son – it isn’t. It is a particular group of cells that do not listen to the body’s imperatives anymore. They are renegades who cannot be controlled by the body’s signals that tell it how to grow and when to die.’

  ‘You make it sound so benign – so unintentional.’

  ‘And you make it sound so malicious. Each day your cells divide nearly 300 billion times. And seventy billion cells will die as they are programmed to do. Cancer cells can evade programmed cell death even though cell death is designed to target such mutations.’

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re trying to say,’ Noah replied. He was staring at Khan, still incredulous the man seemed unaffected by the monkey bite.

  Khan pulled the mask over his head and threw it in the bin. He sat down on a stool and fiddled with the dials on his benchtop centrifuge.

  ‘Cells divide all the time – I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that sometimes, occasionally, these cells will replicate in a different way – they will mutate. Perhaps they mutate for a reason.’

  ‘Now I’m sure you’re a mad scientist.’ Noah shook his head, surprised at his own vehemence. He was here to investigate this man, not debate him. ‘Cancer has a reason? And Ebola – does that have a reason too? It’s an act of aberration.’

  ‘Or an act of Nature that has a purpose – a motive,’ Khan replied.

  The scientist had tried to keep the virus alive – did the virus have a purpose and a motivation, or did Khan?

  ‘Please don’t tell me you think the virus is sentient?’

  ‘It wants to thrive – just like us, Noah. I think it longs to live.’

  ‘It longs for nothing – like all organisms it simply follows a genetic imperative to survive. Part of its survival modus is that it kills in order to survive.’ Just like us. Just like me.

  ‘Do you think that is every cell’s core imperative? Simply to survive? I think there is more to every cell than that. The virus, cancer and us – we want more than that.’

  ‘What more is there than survival?’

  ‘There is meaning.’

  ‘There is nothing beyond birth, survival and death. Some cells survive longer than others. Some cells adapt in order to survive. Some survive at the expense of others. That’s the only distinction between any of us and that is our only purpose.’ Noah stopped. He was breathless.

  ‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’

  He brushed off the old man. ‘What do you propose we do – learn to live with the virus peacefully? We can’t even do that with our own species. You’re a virologist – your job is to destroy viruses.’

  ‘No,’ Khan shook his head. ‘My job is to study them and learn from them. They have so much to teach us about ourselves. My wife, she told me that. She wasn’t afraid of the cells in her body that were aberrations – despite what people said . . . or did. She embraced the disease that killed her in the end.’

  Khan had said too much and yet he seemed relieved to have shared his thoughts.

  ‘She was unusual then,’ Noah said, suddenly sad. ‘And very lucky.’

  ‘Yes, she was. Shall we call it a day, Noah? You seem tired. Tomorrow we study and learn again.’ Khan instructed Devi to turn off the equipment and the lights.

  Chapter 13

  Noah inhaled the sharp salty air rolling in from the ocean. He curled his toes in the sand, feeling the grit of broken shells prick his skin like dull pins. The sand was warm despite the early hour.

  ‘Thank you for joining me.’ Khan stretched his body up towards the sky.

  Noah copied Khan’s movements, even though he knew the sequence. The only people on the beach were fishermen. Vijay was parked on the side of the road, smoking his breakfast cigarette and watching them.

  There was a green sedan, four cars away. Noah had seen it several times before. The surveillance team following him should have rotated cars. It wasn’t good practice to use the same team every day either. He had recognised them immediately – they were the porters outside the airport.

  The fishermen had already cast their nets out in the deeper water and were pulling their small wooden boats back in to shore. They wrapped their sarongs high around their waists, stopping occasionally to retie them when they slipped into the water and ballooned like colourful puffer fish. They called loudly to Khan, laughing. He waved bac
k, held up two fingers and then ten.

  ‘What are they saying?’

  ‘They want to know how much fish I want for dinner. I said tomorrow I want two cuttlefish and ten king prawns. I want you to try our fruits from the ocean – we don’t need tanks.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you but you don’t have to entertain me, Amir. I usually eat with my team after we’ve completed our daily report.’

  ‘You shouldn’t eat late, it’s bad for your digestion.’ Khan raised his arms again, arching his back, his palms folded. He then dropped and stretched his torso along the sand, pushing himself up like a cobra.

  ‘That’s what my mother tells me.’

  ‘Your mother is right. My wife used to say the same thing.’ Khan sat down, legs crossed. He looked out across the horizon. ‘She used to love it here. I’ve been thinking about her a lot lately, I don’t know why.’

  ‘How did she die?’ Noah asked. It wasn’t relevant to his investigation but he was intrigued. Khan had said his wife embraced the disease – the aberration – that killed her. He could never have done that.

  ‘It was . . . an illness, many years ago.’

  Noah sat next to him. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Thank you. It’s bearable now, the grief. Still heavy but bearable. It is part of my daily routine, like this exercise. She was sick for a little while before she died. We were never able to have children. She would have been a good mother.’

  ‘You would have been a good father too, I think.’ Noah surprised himself.

  ‘Thank you. I wasn’t there with her at the end. I wonder about her last moments – was she afraid? Did she think about me, or her life, or whether she had remembered to soak the dhal for dinner.’ He laughed sadly. ‘I wonder if she was angry at me for leaving her.’

  ‘You shouldn’t blame yourself. I –’ Noah hesitated. ‘I’ve been with people when they died. I held my father’s hand.’ And my daughter’s, he thought.

  Khan turned to him. He looked so much older than his years. Grief did that to people. He stood up. ‘We should begin our day. The virus waits for no man. I need to do a quick swim out there.’ He pointed to the lifebuoy bobbing in the distance, just shy of the churning waters of the break.