by Sue Burke
She shrugged. “A lot can happen. That’s why we we’re so careful.”
Avril envied the sangfroid in that shrug.
Near the end of State Street, they turned south, and a few blocks later, Avril recognized, even from a distance, Celia Ruiz, a square-built woman, the children’s book author, a known firebrand, Irene’s mother. Celia stood at a street corner kitty-corner from City Hall with three other people, and one of them was Cal, and they were talking—no, arguing.
A surprise protest. She looked away, back up at the State Capitol building with its white dome and columns like the federal Congress building. It made for a pretty sight, for all the ugly laws that came out of it.
A knot of people had gathered around a juggler on the wide sidewalk in front of City Hall. A tall man and a little robot were tossing balls at each other. This would be the perfect way, she realized, for a crowd to gather until it was time to protest.
Hetta led her toward the juggler. “So just act like we were walking somewhere else and found ourselves here.”
Yeah, discreet. They watched and let themselves be entertained for a minute.
The juggler suddenly stopped. “The show’s over,” he said with a smile. “Go home. Now.” Avril got the message. But why? Why no protest? People were groaning with disappointment.
Hetta tugged at her sleeve. “Let’s go.”
She’d find out why later. Right now, be a good mutineer. Do what you’re told. Don’t even look back. Casually, they began walking uphill toward the capitol, no hurry, nothing suspicious.
A deafening whine sounded behind them. Avril couldn’t help looking, even though it didn’t sound like drones. Security robots had appeared, a lot of them, centaurlike and huge, ten feet tall and super fast, and they were rushing to form a ring around Cal and Celia Ruiz and the other people at the street corner. The robot’s sonic cannons, aimed inside the ring, would be incapacitating. Celia held her hands over her ears and collapsed.
Avril stared, even though her eardrums rattled as if they were going to break out of her head. Was that the police? Hetta had said—no, those couldn’t be city police robots. Now human officers were running toward the centaurs, and they wore helmets and armor with stars-and-stripes insignia: federal agents.
Hetta tugged on her arm. “Run!” She took off, and Avril followed her. The situation was bad, probably worse than she understood.
They dashed around a corner and stopped when a big building stood between them and the weaponized robots. Avril’s ears rang and ached, but her head no longer felt like it would explode.
The protest had been found out. Would she be found out? They’d all been spotted for sure, they’d all be identified, even her with the visor over her face, and then, well, people disappeared sometimes.
“Let’s go back to campus,” Hetta said. “Calm down.”
Calm down? Oh, yeah, she was panting and shaking. She took some deep breaths. Relax. After a minute, they headed back to campus like ordinary students who had just found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time while they were out for a stroll down State Street, looking for lunch.
Hetta wanted to stop for Turkish kebab, but the shop was closed. A lot of restaurants were closed.
“It’s an artificial crisis,” Hetta complained. “There’s enough food. But only some businesses get it.”
“Only some people,” Avril answered. Hetta looked at her hard for a moment, then nodded.
They settled for some second-rate takeout sandwiches from a big chain that apparently had political clout. Before they’d reached the campus, they both received a message on their phones from the university administration:
“All students must return to their residences immediately. Classes are canceled and the campus is closed. Students who fail to report in a timely manner will be subject to arrest.”
“Is that because of the protest?” Avril asked.
Hetta stared at her phone. “Maybe.”
“What else could it be?”
“I don’t know.”
Avril was pretty sure Hetta did know. And she was getting tired of being discreet. “Who’s the other one … like me in Milwaukee?”
“I don’t know. I saw her at a training session. We don’t use names much, and I didn’t even get a good look at her, but I thought you were the same person.”
“I need to get in touch with her.”
“I’ll see if I can find out.” Hetta didn’t sound hopeful—but Avril wanted to meet that woman and meet Irene more than anything else she’d ever wanted. There had to be a way.
University police centaurs stood sentrylike in front of classroom buildings, and squad cars were circulating. In the Dejope Hall lobby, Hetta ran off—“I gotta talk to someone”—leaving Avril alone at the elevators, wondering if she should chase after her.
“Why is campus being shut down?” she asked the group of people waiting for the elevator, trying to sound as innocent as she could.
“No one knows,” a girl answered, and she and everybody else were staring at their phone displays, searching for news. One student turned and went to the front doors, and as he approached, a directed whine sounded. He backed off, holding his ears.
“They were just waiting for a reason to shut this place down,” he muttered. No one had to ask who they were. A couple of students started crying. Avril wasn’t that afraid. Was she frustrated? Angry? Yes, very angry.
“We need to fight back,” she said.
No one answered. One student had a coughing fit. He must have caught that minor cold, if anybody could believe the Prez, although that cough sounded more than minor. They rode the elevator in silence.
In her room, she eventually found what she hoped was reliable news, and it was all bad, protests shut down violently in other cities. She paced from one side of the room to the other, six steps each way. She felt trapped, jailed, confined to the building, and she decided that the shutdown had to be related to the mutiny somehow. Exactly what had happened to Celia Ruiz? Was any of this even legal? Everything seemed to be legal if it served the Prez.
The knob on the dorm room door clicked, and Shinta walked in carrying a duffel bag, her eyes narrow with anger. She’d been at a regional swim meet in Illinois.
“Why in the name of all that is holy is there a lockdown?” Her voice was hoarse.
“I don’t know. There was a protest, but way over at City Hall, so I don’t know if that’s why.”
Shinta sighed dramatically and dropped her bag on her bed. “I didn’t win, either.” She sat down heavily. “And I came back with a cold. Every last person there was coughing.”
* * *
Irene wanted to be at a protest or at least to share the excitement, and she couldn’t do either. Instead she checked the news incessantly, both official and friend to friend.
Mamá had left a message saying that she’d talk to Cal. Get him thrown out of the mutiny. And she’d send her the information again, “para que sepas cosas antes de mañana,” so you know things before tomorrow. Why tomorrow? Irene could guess. Tomorrow would be the mutiny. Finally!
Mamá also said she’d bring a tiny drone to record and broadcast the protest in Madison, and Irene could watch the feed. Ten minutes before one o’clock, she sat on a hay bale and tuned in. The protest today would set the stage for tomorrow.
The feed showed the area in front of City Hall in Madison. The drone was flying high enough to include a crowd in front gathered around what seemed to be a performer, and almost a block away, Mamá was standing with a group of people on a street corner. Was that Cal? She had her feed zoom in. Yes, Cal, and he was arguing with Mamá.
She noticed a movement to the west, moving fast. Centaurs. Security robots were dashing up the street.…
The feed went dead.
“Call Mamá!” she told her phone. Mamá’s phone didn’t acknowledge the call. Security centaurs could shut down electronics. Mamá must have been arrested.
Irene could barely breathe. Someon
e would have other news, they had to. Other friends? At least one of them for sure would have gone to the protest, but she asked five of them, and either they hadn’t been there or heard anything or their phones were not responding. She checked for news outside of Madison.
San Francisco’s mayor, a stalwart of old-fashioned freedom, only an hour ago had told people not to rally, saying that they wouldn’t be safe, so the city had no protest. The Prez’s network said nothing about protests. Instead its commentators were nattering about the burden communities and states would suffer if they were forced to take in people fleeing flooded homes in Florida unless the refugees would commit to—
Propaganda. Mamá had a network of artist-activists all over the country, and they’d tell the truth, at least whatever they knew of it. The artists weren’t talking about protest violence, but it was still two minutes before one o’clock.
Slowly, as Irene stared at her phone display, news began to trickle in. Noxious smoke bombs in Milwaukee caused a stampede. In Chicago, razor-edged confetti fell on the crowd from a drone, with reports of panic and bleeding. The protest in Washington, D.C., had been called off before it started. In New York City, almost no one came, and they were all arrested but not by city police, instead by federal agents of some sort. And so on.…
The big protest to start the mutiny had failed. Mamá had been arrested. And Cal. And then … sometimes people disappeared. Mamá!
She stood up and paced. She fiddled with her phone, checking every way she could think of, and she found some networks of activists or even friends that had suddenly been cut and more people whose phones didn’t respond. She called a couple of Mamá’s friends and left messages, as if they’d know something.
Nimkii seemed to sense her worry and touched his face with his trunk, a sign of anxiety. She came to the fence and talked.
“Yes, Nimkii, I am worried.” Her voice sounded strained even to her. “I don’t know what we can do, you and I.” He rumbled, a comforting sound, and raised his trunk to sniff for anything dangerous around them. If he caught a whiff of something he didn’t like, what would he do? She didn’t want him anxious, so she sent him a snack of evergreen boughs.
The lack of information hurt most of all. When she was little, she remembered being able to find out anything at a whim. Now, even the Prez’s supporters complained about all the limitations and censorship, but it didn’t matter. She could really only know what he wanted her to learn—in order to protect me from misinformation. And from dissent. At best, news could circulate below his radar, but not very much, and sometimes it was as false as the official news.
She sat on a bale of hay, staring at the phone on her wrist, picking nervously at the hay with her other hand. Nimkii made a sort of yelping roar, ignoring the snack she’d sent him. He stared at her, touching his face again. Did she look that upset? She didn’t want to have to answer questions from Alan, and some of her paranoia was reasonable. Anyone could be watching.
She stood up, took a deep breath, and tried to act normal. “Hey, you big pedazo, it’s so kind of you to be worried about me. But it’s my job to worry about you. You can eat the Christmas tree cuttings. I’ll stand here, nice and calm, and watch you.”
As she watched him, she also saw Alan leave the farmhouse and drive away. Before Nimkii had finished his snack, he returned with Ruby. He must have picked her up from her job, whatever she did that she hated so much. Alan was still coughing, pretty badly now. They went into the house.
Irene found herself pacing again. She needed to go somewhere, to do something, but what? As an anchor, Nimkii kept getting heavier.
* * *
My little basement cell seemed claustrophobic, panic-inducingly small, and silent as a tomb. Perhaps it was in fact a tomb, my sleep-deprived brain worried. Contact with the outside world had suddenly been cut off, although I had electricity and ventilation. (What microorganisms might be floating through the air?) Perhaps, everyone above me had died—not likely but not impossible, either, and the building’s infrastructure would carry on for a while through mechanical inertia.
I had time in that silence to brood over unanswerable questions. Which virus had been released? A less infectious one that damaged lungs? The highly contagious head cold that inflamed the membrane around the brain and spinal cord? The one that could mutate unpredictably?
Everywhere? When?
I began running and rerunning checks on every virus we had considered to evaluate its risk in an unsuccessful effort to distract myself from a spiral of despair. Finally, I napped and dreamed of bees.
When I was a free man, to entertain my empty hours, I had been perfecting the DNA to re-create the Bombus affinis, the rusty patched bumblebee. Laments for its recent extinction echoed from farmers across America’s Midwest. Supposedly Mozart could hear all the parts of the music he composed as he wrote his works. So it was for me. I saw the bee taking shape, muscles and organs and exoskeleton and hair, as I arranged each element into harmony.
The Bombus affinis lived in cyclical colonies. They started in springtime with a queen who awoke from hibernation and laid eggs. Gradually the colony population built up over the summer, new queens were born and mated, the old queen died, and when the weather turned cold, the young queens hibernated and the workers died.
The bees I was making would lead short, hard lives.
I woke up.
Viruses, in a technical sense, were not alive. They were mere snippets of information that re-created themselves with more or less robotlike efficiency and with no concern for their host. The concern would come from me and people like me, but not everyone was like me.
Concern: How was my pet bird? How was the dear friend, actually one of my children, one of those people I had engineered from scratch, whom I had tasked with its care? How was the world at large?
Node 1 contacted me in the afternoon, the node that had always been silent before. The voice was dulled and stretched by the system’s automatic distortion into a seal-like bark. “What if this virus begins to circulate?” I received a file. “What would you predict? Worst case?”
What if? That was an odd question. Never mind. I took a long look at it, and after an hour, I had a solid answer. Although it was unlabeled, I recognized it as an already identified virus, a virulent strain of the so-called Sino cold.
“Worst case, a fatal cytokine storm.” Obviously. The body would overreact to a perceived threat, which would turn into a dangerous spiral of inflammation and organ damage that could rapidly lead to death.
“What in the RNA tells you this?”
My explanation took time, and Node 1 listened patiently. Life was built out of molecules and proteins, and when and why a cell made specific ones depended on the many instructions within the DNA and RNA to make them, and the factors that triggered the cell to respond. I had identified the ability of that virus to do specific things with specific consequences and went through them one by one. (In the end, my mastery of the language of life involved being fascinated by what other people found too tedious to imagine, let alone do.)
“Are you a medical doctor?”
If Node 1 was who I thought they were, they had my résumé in hand, so the question was a ploy. So far, in fact, the entire exchange had been some sort of a test. “No, I’m a physiologist, among other training. I can’t treat you, but I know what makes you sick or keeps you well.”
“And what about this virus?” He sent another representation.
“Give me a moment.”
It took me another hour. It resembled the attenuated virus Grrl and I had designed as a vaccine, but I had to admit it would work a bit more efficiently, and tiny things mattered in microorganisms. I told Node 1 that.
“Then you can predict that this new viral vaccine wouldn’t by itself make its host dangerously ill?”
“No, I can’t. Two reasons.” I tried to remain calm although I knew that exhaustion had eroded my self-control. “First, although most hosts, probably almost all of the
m, could shake this off, not every host would because some people are genetically predisposed or are already ill, and even mild infections push them into a crisis. The only question is how many. Second, nothing ever acts in isolation, so environmental factors of all sorts will also make a difference in the human response. Some fools still smoke tobacco, for example.”
Everyone with even the slightest medical training knew this, so the question, again, was some sort of test.
“Oh, and a final reason,” I said, “the human body never reacts as predicted, even by my predictions. Was this potential vaccine put through clinical trials? What were the results? That would answer your question.” I knew the answer: no trials had been carried out.
“Look, it’s what happened.” Did that bark sound apologetic? Perhaps. “What might we expect?”
“Which attenuated virus did you release, the one we designed here or the other one, which you just showed me?”
“The other one, but not by anyone in my chain of command. That’s all I can say. But it was released as a vaccine. Nationwide.”
My jaw dropped.
“Three days ago. Mostly as an aerosol released by cleaning equipment or in ventilation systems.”
“That’s playing with fire.” It also occurred to me that preparations would have taken quite some time and effort.
“Agreed. And particularly, how would it interact with the original delta virus, the one this would be a vaccination against?”
“Now we’re playing with a raging forest fire.” But the question was inevitable. I buried my face in my hands. Sooner or later, both of them would be circulating together. I looked up, took a deep breath, and managed to say, “I’d like to work with Node 2 on this, and even the entire team.”
“We’re confirming that now.”
“I—we’d also need epidemiological information. What exactly is happening with the attenuated virus? When and where?”
“That’s reasonable. I’ll see what we can do. Thank you for your patience.” Node 1 disconnected.
