The Furnace

by Timothy S. Johnston

  Complete and utter silence. Then Manny growled as understanding came. “My God. The Council. Their DNA isn’t in the database. Which means...”

  “Yes,” I said. “The nanos have been programmed to spread through the Terran Confederacy and pass through thousands, maybe millions of people, until they infect one of the Council members. Then they kill him.”

  It was an incredible plan; no wonder it had taken me so long to figure it out. It was brilliant, insidious, masterful...

  And disgusting.

  All eyes were now on Malichauk, but he remained silent.

  I pressed on. “The nano is partly a bacterium. I assume you’ve been working on this for years—it’s really quite incredible. There must have been a lot of experiments, and a lot of failures. Only you have access to the samples of bacteria you needed. You told me that yourself, remember? You seemed to brag that only you had access to the refrigerator where biological samples are kept. And only you could have access to the Council member’s DNA. You see, you worked for one of them, as a young man. You had access to a hair sample, a skin sample. Something like that. And you were a biologist before medical school.” I sighed. “It’s a difficult case, you know. I’m still not sure why the killer removed the head and hands of the victims. There are things I don’t know yet. But I had to act before the infection could spread off the station. I had to destroy the jumpship. I had to launch the escape pods. I can’t let anyone leave until we figure this thing out.”

  Malichauk finally stirred. “Very good, Tanner.” It was a whisper.

  “You haven’t told us everything yet, have you?” Shaheen asked me.

  “No. There’s one more thing, and then Malichauk can take over and tell us all about the nanos.” I hardened my gaze. “The drop of blood I found is from one of us here. Jimmy witnessed an attack in the life-support module. During that attack, the nanos moved from one person to another. I know who one of those people is. The problem is, the infection has likely now spread further.”

  Lingly gasped. “My God! Are you saying those nanos are in some of us?”

  I nodded. “In a minute Malichauk will tell us all about it. But the blood I found belonged to...” I paused and studied everyone seated before me.

  “It belonged to Brick Kayle.”

  * * *

  Brick was glaring at me with hatred in his eyes. I studied him, fascinated. Did he even know the nanos had infected him? What were they doing inside him? What was their purpose? How did they operate? Were they really designed to kill, and if so, how?

  “Are you aware of the infection?” I asked him. The others watched in shocked fascination. The scientists, who happened to be sitting close to him, slid their chairs away.

  “Yes,” he snarled. “They’re in me.”

  “You’re the one who attacked me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You cleaned the blood from my cabin. You put the night-vision glasses in Jimmy’s things.”

  “Yes.”

  “You left the clinic while Malichauk performed the autopsies and infected Bram just before the meteor storm.” It occurred to me that in fact Malichauk had let Brick leave the clinic to do so, but that would have to come out later.

  “Yes.”

  “Who did you attack in the life-support module?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Manny said, “Maybe there’s some test we can do to figure out who’s infected. Something—”

  The lights dimmed again, and this time they faded almost completely to black. There was a scuffle and a scream. My hand shot to my pistol, but I realized belatedly that Rickets had taken it from me earlier. Damn!

  I lunged at where Brick had been seconds before. I crashed into someone and fell hard to the deck. I grabbed an arm, twisted—

  And the lights came back on slowly. They were still dim, but bright enough that I could see I had a hold of Larry Balch. He grunted and shook me off in anger.

  I rose and looked around, frantic.

  Brick had gotten away.

  “Hey, where’s Bram?” Shaheen said, looking around.

  He was gone too.

  Two very important people were now loose on the station. I growled under my breath. We were in more danger than ever.

  Part Four: Amplification

  Investigator’s Log: Lieutenant Kyle Tanner,

  Security Division, Homicide Section, CCF

  As soon as Bram and Brick escaped, I knew we were in major shit. I should have anticipated it, dammit. I’d suspected the nanos were in Brick—his blood sample in the life-support module should have made that obvious to me. And Bram? I’d known they had infected him too. And yet because Rickets had taken my pistol, the two had escaped.

  It was the beginning of the end of the investigation, and of the station.

  I was now on my second spare oxygen bottle; only eight hours remained. I had managed to shield myself from the radiation, though not completely. I continued to cough up blood, but there were no new symptoms. I was pleased about that.

  But I was still going to die.

  I had finally managed to convert my comm to a unidirectional transmitter, but I still had no idea where Mercury was. I didn’t even know the comm’s range.

  My current velocity was three kilometers per second. I had launched myself from SOLEX using the mass driver some seven hours earlier. After a quick calculation in my head, I figured I had traveled 75,600 kilometers. And how far away was Mercury? Sixty million kilometers. I wasn’t going nearly fast enough. And there was no way my comm signal was going to make it that far without breaking up into unintelligible static.

  Eight hours of oxygen left. A weak unidirectional comm. Maybe if I could amplify the signal. But where could I get more power? The comm drew a steady amount from the suit, and if I increased it much more, it would most likely burn out. Maybe I could add a bit more without causing too much damage...

  What were the other power drains on my vacsuit? Life support, of course. The fans and cooling unit. Maybe if I took power from those, I could funnel it to the communit. I would have to be careful, but it was an option. Maybe my last one. If I shut down the suit’s life support, however, how long could I last? Maybe ten minutes, max. The sun would broil me alive.

  I hit on a sudden idea: what if I turned off the life support and funneled extra power into the communit for only a minute at a time? Then restart the suit’s essential systems to keep me from burning up, then wait five minutes and repeat the process.

  It might actually work. It was impossible to know for sure how far the transmission would get, but I had to try. There were no other options.

  I started to work on the suit controls, and as I did so, continued to record my story. I had to get it finished before the end, which was coming awfully fast.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We were still in the common mess. I had reclaimed my pistol from Rickets; it was once again snug in my holster. “Everyone stay where you are!” I yelled. “No one else leaves.” I gestured at the chairs and watched carefully as they sat. It was obvious to me that there were probably more infected, and I couldn’t let them follow Brick.

  “This still isn’t making any sense,” Manny said. He had also made a grab for Brick in the darkness but had ended up sprawled face-first on the deck. The escape had been a surprise to us all. “Bram’s a friend,” he continued. “I’ve known him for decades!” His eyes were wide.

  An uncomfortable feeling settled in my gut. He didn’t understand. “Manny, Bram is gone. I’m sorry. He’s been gone since the attack during the meteor storm. He’s already dead.” I turned to Malichauk. “Tell us,” I ordered. “Everything.”

  He looked like a beaten man. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I sent the infection out with the hope that it would find its way t
o the intended victims without hurting other people.”

  “A Council member.”

  His eyebrows lifted. “All of them, actually. Hidden within the nano’s code are DNA sequences for all ten Council members.”

  The computer had decoded one, but the encryption had concealed nine others. I’d been lucky.

  “But this infection, Lars—it could spread unhindered forever.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “At least it wasn’t supposed to. I programmed them to leave the body after infecting the tenth host. That way, the infection would leave SOLEX, but after the nanos hit the tenth victim, they would vacate the body of the first. Do you understand? The infection is something like a snake, moving forever outward, whose head grows while its tail shrinks. It’s a limiting factor I built into them. After the targets are gone, the nanos disappear forever. They were only using us as hosts. We weren’t supposed to even be aware of them.”

  “Why the murders? Why the severed heads and hands?”

  He threw his arms up. “That’s what I don’t understand. I was hoping to watch Bram, to study him as the infection took hold. When I found him, unconscious with blood on his forearm, I knew infection had occurred. I wanted to understand what’s happening. These murders...” He held his head in his hands. “Something has happened. The nanos have a life of their own now. It’s just...”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “An idea. It might explain a few things.”

  I folded my arms. “Come on, Malichauk. Tell us everything.”

  He exhaled sharply. “It began thirty years ago, but it was only recently that I made the breakthrough that made the nanos possible.”

  “From the beginning,” I pressed.

  He sighed. “Thirty years ago, my brother attended university in Kyoto, Japan. He was a great mathematician who’d won several awards and scholarships. I didn’t know it—none of his family did—but he had negative feelings about our beloved Council.” He snorted. “The Council. That band of criminals has no right to govern humanity. They’re not elected. They rule with an iron fist. They’ve eliminated all of our freedoms! Speech, religion, media—they regulate them all. And if someone speaks out about them, he disappears. Sent to a camp maybe? Executed? Who knows?”

  He ran his fingers through his thick black hair. “My brother never acted on his thoughts—he only talked. He ran a club at the university where people got together to discuss things they had heard...abuses of power and so on. They tried to keep it private, but of course it was impossible in that sort of setting. Too many people were involved. Someone ratted on them to the nearest Council rep, and the military crashed one of their meetings. They took everyone away. The lucky ones only spent a few years in camps...” He stared at the bulkhead behind me as he relived images that only he could see. “My brother never came out,” he said in a soft voice. “I’m sure they executed him, but they said he died on a hunger strike.”

  “And you’ve blamed the Council ever since,” Manny whispered.

  “Yes. For thirty years I’ve been thinking of ways to murder those bastards. Nothing I came up with was practical. Oh, I had ideas. Assassination. An ‘accident’ in space. Suborbital crash. I thought of everything, but it all seemed too amateurish. There was always something that they could trace back to me. So I’ve spent all this time planning.”

  “That’s why you’ve been asking for positions on remote outposts,” I mumbled.

  “Yes. It has allowed me the opportunity to research methods of assassination that they couldn’t trace. And I thought I had succeeded. It seemed so brilliant, but something obviously has gone wrong.”

  It was a momentous understatement. Two murders...infected people who were no longer human...and all his doing.

  “Tell us about the nanos,” I said.

  “I came up with the idea almost a decade ago. A self-replicating nano that could travel around the Terran Confederacy, moving from host to host until it identified a target. When it did, it would implement a piece of code that took me longer to create than the replication did.”

  “What was it?”

  “The kill code, Tanner. You see, the nanos are indeed bacterial. I managed to link each with a microscopic processor that can control it. I programmed the nano to migrate to the infected person’s brain and inhabit a neuron. Using the processor, I taught the nanos how to control the neurons!”

  “You lost me,” I said with a shake of my head. “Go back a bit.”

  He pursed his lips. “There are billions of neurons in the human brain. Each one communicates with adjacent neurons through electrochemical processes. Signals sent across tiny spaces between the cells—called synapses—are picked up by other neurons and transmitted across the brain and through the body’s nervous system. The neural net. Simply put, I programmed the nanos to replicate and inhabit every single neuron in the host’s brain. When that is completed, the nanos take control of the neurons. They regulate the firing of the cells and the signals sent across the synapses.” He paused. “In essence, the nanos take control of the host.”

  Complete, utter silence. Then, “This is insane!” Grossman yelled. “This madman has been running crazy experiments here since day one! He set this infection loose on the station!”

  Malichauk looked sad. He glanced at the others. “He’s quite right, you know. I did set the nanos loose here, expecting them to spread outward and eventually find the Council members.”

  “Who was the first infected person?” I asked. I already knew, but I wanted to make sure.

  “Brick Kayle. I injected a batch of the nanos into him during a medical examination eight weeks ago, and my plan—thirty years in the making—finally started.”

  It seemed fitting, in a way. His distaste for the Council had led to the first infection—the station’s Council representative.

  I turned to Shaheen. “All your talk of exponential growth was right on. It was important.”

  “It would seem so.” She had her reader out and was plotting a graph. “If the infection began with one nano, then... Doctor, at what point does control in the host begin?”

  “Not until they inhabit all the neurons. I programmed them that way.”

  “So at one hundred billion nanos.”

  I glanced at her, impressed. She had the number instantly at her fingertips. She was perhaps the most intelligent person I had ever met.

  “But that would take forever,” Manny said.

  “No, it wouldn’t take long at all, as Shaheen taught me earlier.”

  She looked up from her reader. “Almost eighteen and a half hours,” she said, “provided infection is by a single nano.”

  He blinked. “What? That quickly?”

  “Here, look.” She showed Manny the graph. The number of nanos was placed on the vertical axis. The horizontal axis showed the progression of time. There was a solid line placed horizontally across the graph at the hundred billion threshold. It intersected with the number of host nanos at nearly eighteen and a half hours.

  I grunted. “That makes sense. When you sent Riddel from SOLEX, he was hallucinating and raving about the heat, the radiation, and so on. But some twenty hours later, while in Dr. Higby’s care on Mercury, he was apparently fine.” I turned to Malichauk. “Someone must have infected Jarvis just before he left the station. Did you do it?”

  “No.” His mouth twitched. “The miracle of the nanos. They have a life of their own—infecting others to spread toward the inevitable.”

  I studied him for a moment. He seemed proud of his accomplishment—even though it might now mean his own death.

  Something tingled at my senses, begged for attention, but I disregarded it. Malichauk’s story was too important to ignore.

  Manny peered at the chart and said, “Incredible. It happens so quickly.”

 
“So while the nanos are multiplying—” I said to the doctor.

  “A process called amplification,” he supplied.

  “—what does the host feel?”

  “Nothing. No change at all.”

  Lingly shot to her feet. “How could you do this? And you tried to cover it up! You washed the blood off Bram’s arm to hide the infection!”

  He nodded and gave a soft sigh. “I hid Bram’s infection to study him. I want to know why they aren’t following their programming. Why they’re murdering.”

  “But—” she stammered.

  I waved her off. “Let’s just hear him out. Maybe there’s some way we can stop this from continuing.”

  Malichauk turned his attention back to me. “The takeover will occur rather suddenly. As soon as they reach the hundred billion threshold. And then, bang, they assume control.”

  “What are they supposed to do?”

  “Only two things. First, they check the DNA of the host against the DNA codes I programmed them with. If the host is a Council member, then they activate the kill code.”

  I frowned. “How?”

  “The nanos have the host commit suicide. Whatever’s handy. A jump from a building. Pistol. Anything. I programmed them to be quite versatile.”

  “Obviously,” Manny mumbled.

  “What’s the second thing?” I asked.

  “If the host is not a Council member, they’re required to pass the infection on to ten people. When that’s done, the nanos proceed to the bladder, the same as with all other medical nanos.”

  “They pass the infection through the hand, right?”

  “Yes, you already guessed that. When a new host is located in a quiet place, nanos move to the fingers and infection will occur. The host wasn’t supposed to be aware of it—it would be a short period of missing time, nothing more.”

  I shook my head in anger; the euphemisms he used were outrageous. Infection in this case meant a violent assault. So violent, in fact, that I had nearly lost my life.