by A. T. Avon
But this time it was different. Daniel felt himself stop struggling just as suddenly as he had flown into a rage. He felt himself stand straighter than he had in years, turning on the spot, his palms to the back of his head, tears streaming from his eyes. He looked to the ceiling, then bent double. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay.’ He had spent every day here, every waking hour, ensuring this ARC would fail when the zombies came. And now – now that they were coming – he had to fix it?
He had left it too late.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Just let me work with her, with Jason too, and don’t hurt them. I’ll do whatever you ask.’
Chapter 3
Somewhere in the Gobi
Missy was woken by the phone Tang had given her. She answered groggily. ‘Yeah?’
‘We need to talk.’
It was her father’s voice.
‘Where are you?’ Still half asleep, Missy’s eyes came to rest on a large spider over on the wall opposite her. She sat up, unsettled by both the call and the spider’s presence.
‘I’ve sent someone to collect you.’
There was a knock on the door.
The spider took a few rapid steps before pausing.
Stay on the phone or answer the door?
‘It’s just me,’ came a voice through the door.
Houellebecq.
‘Who did you send?’ she asked her father.
‘Houellebecq,’ came the reply. ‘He there yet?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then let him in. Suit up and I’ll see you both in five.’
Suit up?
The line went dead.
Missy dressed quickly. She exited the small one-bedroom apartment she’d been allotted in the Chinese facility and followed Houellebecq past three military checkpoints, on into a large room, where she was made to change into a Hazmat suit. After this, she was led through an airlock, into an even larger room. It felt like something out of a movie – a movie set in space. Everything was high tech and there were CCTV cameras tracking her every move.
Her father was already there. He was wearing a Hazmat suit, too.
‘Welcome to the pen,’ he said, rubbing his gloved hands as if about to get down to business. ‘This is where we’ll experiment.’
‘The what?’
Missy glanced at the “pen”. It was in the center of the room. It was a hole – a deep, fully enclosed hexagonal hole to be precise, with a railing running around the top. The railing was set up with a small table for taking notes and with a simple feeder system that provided food and water to something below.
She edged closer and looked down into the “pen” or hole.
Rats. Thousands of them. At the base, five-foot down, the pen had six triangular compartments, allowing the rats to form nests and what Missy guessed were distinct social groupings.
Her father started talking, his words tumbling over one another, like he wanted to make up for lost time and detail everything all at once. The sections in each pen, he explained, were connected, so that the rats could mix freely. But generally they didn’t. ‘Generally the first four pairs multiply up to about two-thousand rats,’ he said, ‘all grouped according to complex social dynamics.’
‘Why are you showing me this?’
Her father had promised to tell Missy who she was, had promised to explain her past. But so far, for all his talk, he had left her even more confused than she had been before finding him. This explanation seemed to be more of the same. She was tired of nonsense.
‘I’m showing you because you need to understand. Once the population reaches two-thousand in a given pen, slowly, pointlessly, the entire pen goes extinct.’ He wiped at the mask on his suit, adding: ‘Don’t get me wrong. This, in and of itself, isn’t groundbreaking. I set up these experiments based on the 1960s research of a man called John Calhoun.’
More detail, more riddles. Missy stayed quiet. Get to the point, will you?
But her father kept dancing around it. He explained that Calhoun had spent his life conducting experiments on the effects of overcrowding on social animals like mice and rats. It was Calhoun who had first discovered that mouse and rat populations would rise in a space-limited environment, then abruptly crater again. The outcome of the experiment was always the same. Irrespective of the amount of food and water, it ended with extinction.
‘And?’ Missy didn’t see the connection between Calhoun’s work and the pandemic circling the world beyond the boundaries of the Chinese facility. ‘What’s the point of endlessly replicating Calhoun’s experiment?’
‘Let him explain, can you?’ Houellebecq said grimly. His face was stern behind his own Hazmat mask.
Her father looked apologetic as he continued. ‘Even with ample food and water, the colony invariably goes through Calhoun’s four distinct phases. “Strive”, as the rats set territories and built nests, “Exploit” as the population explodes, “Equilibrium” as the population peaks and deviant behaviors emerge, then “Decline”. New generations of rats can’t settle into the existing society once the population becomes too large. Some become violent, others reclusive and obsessed with grooming. Either way, they fail to breed effectively. Each new generation becomes progressively more anti-social, more removed from instinct, until the birth rate drops to nothing.’
It was interesting. But Missy still didn’t see the objective. What exactly was her father trying to accomplish here?
‘The effect,’ he said, ‘is chilling in its simplicity, and always compounded by the fact each new generation of rats educates the next. The accepted mores of the pen slowly shift.’
Still talking far too fast, he elaborated. He explained that he had been trying to change this outcome by introducing a Chinese sample of the alien substance. His theory was simple: that the alien substance was not inherently destructive, but rather some kind of intergalactic salvation.
‘Wait,’ said Missy. ‘You introduced the substance? How?’
‘Easy.’
She cast an eye over the pen again, reassuring herself. She was pleased to note the heavy-duty Perspex roof. The pen was a sealed ecosystem, even within the larger ecosystem she had entered via the airlock. The pen also had its own dedicated food and water.
‘Lead,’ said her father. He took out his phone and called up a video. He held it out and pressed play.
Missy was hardly able to believe what she saw next. She watched the substance escape molten lead.
‘The Chinese store it in lead,’ he continued. ‘They discovered lead renders it inert. We heat the lead to release it. As the lead drips away, the substance – which you can see here – looks a lot like white wine. See how it remains hovering and trembling in the air? Incredible, no?’
Missy did see. Before her very eyes, the lead in the video fell away and the substance split, forming spheres of yellow-white fluid – all still trembling slightly. The ball of wine-like fluid at the center was the largest, initially drawing in a lot of the balls closest to it. But some of the other balls resisted this pull. Hardly larger than raindrops, they continued to circle the center ball. It was like looking at the solar system, but made of white wine.
It defied every law of physics Missy knew.
‘That’s the substance?’ she said, her words barely audible. ‘That’s what came from…?’ She didn’t have the words for it. Space? Aliens?
The orbits of each ball gradually widened out in the video, until they struck things. In each case, they became whatever they struck.
‘It’s morphing,’ she said.
Both her father and Houellebecq nodded.
Her father put his phone away. ‘The Chinese have a device – for delivery. It goes into the pen, melts the lead, releases the substance.’
‘And?’ Missy asked. ‘What happens next?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You said you were trying to prevent extinction.’
‘I was pretending to, yes. But I never added a catalyst, a virus.’
Missy
felt herself frown.
‘The fleas we cultivated and infected with plague – to replicate Weifang – I always swapped them out for fleas which weren’t infected.’
‘Weren’t infected? Why?’
‘I couldn’t let the Chinese get ahead of us.’
Missy tried to process this. ‘Us?’
‘America,’ her father said, as if it ought to have been obvious.
Missy glanced back towards Houellebecq, thoroughly confused. ‘And this time is different because…?’
‘You’re here,’ he said.
Missy didn’t know quite what to say this. In the end, she just pointed back toward the pen and said: ‘What do you think will happen?’
‘I don’t know,’ said her father, following her gaze. ‘Now that there’s real plague down there, I’m hoping a few rats get infected. I’m hoping they’ll trigger a dome, and that the infected rats leave while the healthy crowd in or… I’m not sure. This is new territory.’
‘That would reflect the pandemic’s pattern,’ said Houellebecq.
‘I’m hoping,’ continued Missy’s father, with new assuredness, as if an aim had only just come to him, ‘that the rats respect the dome until only the immune are left inside, then attack it.’ He nodded. He was talking to himself now. ‘Yes. Yes, that would be reassuring. That would show we have at least some understanding.’ He looked up at both of them. ‘But honestly, anything could happen. Anything at all. Like I said, new territory.’
‘Meanwhile,’ said Houellebecq, addressing Missy, ‘all the other rats get sick or get killed by infected rats.’
Missy realized what he meant, what he was trying to get across to her. ‘A group prevails? A nest?’
Her father smiled with what might have been pride. ‘Exactly! There’s no behavioral sink, not as there is in the conventional experiment. One group kills all the others, then breeds up. It breeds up to five-thousand, ten-thousand, even in this confined space. Providing I keep up adequate food and water, a new future is ensured.’
‘Then what?’ Missy asked.
‘Then nothing,’ said Houellebecq, confused.
‘I shut off the food and water,’ said her father. ‘I kill them all.’
‘And that helps us how?’
‘We have a better idea of what the substance is trying to do.’
‘No. You’re just confirming a bias.’
There was a flash of irritation on her father’s face, visible even through his mask. ‘What do you want from me, Missy?’ The question came out sounding almost aggressive, and her father was quick to soften it, adding: ‘This is beyond anything we as humans know.’
‘It goes beyond that,’ Houellebecq said. ‘What your father isn’t saying is this: we’re going to find a cure.’
Chapter 4
Somewhere in the Gobi
Missy’s father tick-tocked his head, as if he didn’t quite agree with this statement. ‘A cure?’ he said. ‘Maybe, yes. I don’t know if such a thing is possible in the limited timeframe we have. And I can’t just reset this experiment. You both need to factor that in. It takes time to set up. Days, weeks.’ He started talking, rushing his words as if afraid Houellebecq would cut him off or scold him at any second. ‘The arrival of the substance is different every time, in that the substance alters itself.’ He winced, clearly unhappy with his wording. ‘What I mean is, it turns into whatever it encounters. Inanimate objects, but with a purpose, with an aim. It wants to be ingested. It wants to enter living things, finding life. That much, we’re relatively certain of. Only then does it look for a virus, a way to travel through life.’
‘Remember Tumenzhen?’ Houellebecq asked Missy. He moved to the edge of the pen and put his palms to the Perspex. Putting all his weight on them, he peered down. ‘The locals there, they all talked about it smelling good.’
Missy nodded. She did remember.
‘It seeks out life,’ Missy’s father repeated. ‘If the substance lands in the middle of a desert, or out on open sea, it doesn’t matter. It finds a way. It infects microorganisms or…’ He flapped a hand, perhaps frustrated by his inability to find a ready example. ‘… whatever it can. But the process is the same. It’s only ever the scale that changes.’
Missy thought of the Japanese lab, of the glowing domes she had found deep below it. She already had questions, but she resisted the urge to interrupt. She sensed her father was just getting started.
‘Each time the substance arrives, each time it searches for life and finds it, that success triggers a dome. And then the dome drives out all infected animals. We’ve known this for a long time, even if we’re yet to replicate it. And we’ve seen the pattern in this new pandemic. It’s played out that way countless times. Infected animals feel ill and something – we think it might be a hallucination – compels them to exit the dome.’
‘What’s the latest news from America?’ Missy asked. ‘I tried to get internet on my phone, the one Tang gave me, but couldn’t get beyond the intranet here. Is he just blocking me or –’
‘It’s patchy,’ said Houellebecq. ‘We’ve archived a lot, but newer content is harder and harder to find.’
‘What does that mean?’ Missy asked.
‘It means fewer and fewer people in the world still have working internet access,’ said her father.
There was silence as the unstated alternative sunk in – everyone was dead.
Missy tried to imagine what sort of world had fewer and fewer people online every day. She pictured empty shelves, riots, corpses, and finally decided to return to the problem at hand, to that which she could – at a stretch – control. ‘What kind of hallucination?’
Houellebecq father shrugged. ‘That was only ever a theory, but with this new pandemic, we’re getting a lot of information we weren’t able to obtain from animal trials.’
Missy realized he had just ducked her question.
‘This is some kind of intervention by a higher, benevolent power,’ her father said.
‘Benevolent?’ Missy was skeptical.
Houellebecq obviously was, too. ‘That’s your theory,’ he said, finally straightening up and taking his hands of the Perspex.
‘It’s designed to save humankind from overpopulation,’ said Missy’s father. ‘For that matter, from extinction. We’re so close to a behavioral sink, we just don’t see it.’
‘Your father,’ said Houellebecq, ‘believes information technology has accelerated the process. It’s shifting societal mores faster and faster.’
‘Too fast, Missy. It’s shifting everything too fast. It’s generating abhorrent norms, which have already lowered birth rates.’
‘But we’re not rats,’ said Missy.
Her father tilted his head, confused. ‘We’re social animals, overpopulated, changing rapidly. Yes, we don’t have identical DNA, but this substance is here to save us. I’ve been convinced of that for years, and the pandemic has done nothing to dissuade me. It’s knocked out telecommunications, blunting the unprecedented shift in societal norms that began more than half a century ago with TV, and its lowering population. It’s reversing the trend. Any fool can see that.’
They were interrupted by a voice over a loud-speaker. In heavily accented English, it informed them that they had reached their “maximum allowable time in the container.”
‘The “container”?’ Missy asked.
But the other two had already started obediently back towards the airlock.
Chapter 5
Somewhere in the Gobi
Missy decided she needed time to think. She wanted to process all she had just seen and learned.
She climbed out of the Hazmat suit and went back to her small apartment room in the facility. She swiped her pass card to open the electronic door, then sat cross-legged on the small chair at her even smaller desk. She stared at the wall. The spider was gone.
She didn’t like it here. Outside of the “container”, the facility was cold, sterile, like a modern Supermax prison. She
wanted to board one of the many vehicles she imagined were coming and going from the facility, but she also wanted to help her father. Also wanted answers.
That, after all, was what had brought her to China.
There were the simple, tangible questions. How big was this facility? What did it do? Where was it exactly? But beyond the tangible, she was still battling with the bigger, more esoteric questions. Why had the substance arrived on earth? Was it a blessing, a salvation in disguise as her father seemed to believe? Or was it an attack?
The room gradually got warmer. She couldn’t get a sense of scale, sitting here. Where did the facility begin and end?
She started to sweat as she ran back through everything she knew or thought she knew about the virus, and she had just stood up to switch on the little air con unit – messing around with the controls – when she heard someone at the door.
Kilgariff.
Missy let her in.
Kilgariff sat on the bed with her back to the wall. ‘Hot in here.’
‘I know.’ Missy returned to sitting cross-legged on her little chair. ‘What do you want?’
‘Good to see you, too, Missy.’
Missy ignored the rebuke. After everything that had happened in the Japanese lab, she didn’t trust Kilgariff – and she saw no point in pretending otherwise. For all she knew, Kilgariff was helping West.
‘Houellebecq told me everything,’ Kilgariff said. ‘Are you going to do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Work for the Chinese?’
Missy hadn’t looked at it from this angle, from the perspective of geo-politics. She shrugged again.
‘Are you?’ Kilgariff pressed. ‘Because I am. I want to live, Missy. Even in a world with only China left, I want to live.’
‘Did they send you to convince me?’
‘Who?’
‘Houellebecq, my father, the Chinese.’
‘No.’
‘But someone did?’
It was Kilgariff’s turn to shrug. ‘Tang.’
