Pandemic i-3

by Scott Sigler

  A small table built into the wall held two of Steve’s three laptops. The other rested on top of the blankets of his bunk (he got the top bunk — he was the “boss” of this trip, after all).

  Cooper had warned him that spending too much time belowdecks could lead to seasickness, but so far Steve had felt no ill effects. If anything, the constant rocking motion made him hungry. He chewed mouthfuls of Doritos, which he washed down with swigs of Diet Coke. He felt Bo Pan staring at him. Steve kept typing, tried to ignore his bunkmate.

  “Disgusting,” Bo Pan said. “I do not know how you eat such garbage. We have paid to rent this boat. They would let me use the little kitchen. I could cook you something.”

  Steve tipped the bag of Doritos toward the old man. “Breakfast of champions, Bo Pan. Want some? Blazin’ Buffalo & Ranch, can’t go wrong.”

  Bo Pan’s face wrinkled in disgust. He looked away.

  Steve shrugged and reached in for more. Imagine the dichotomy: Bo “King of Phlegm” Pan calling someone else disgusting.

  “Your machine,” Bo Pan said. “Do you have its twat yet?”

  Steve’s eyebrows rose. “Uh, its what?”

  Bo Pan leaned back slightly, confused. “Twat. Is that not what you call it? The Twatter messages your machine sends?”

  “Ah,” Steve said. “Twitter. It’s a tweet, not a twat. Big difference.”

  The old man waved a hand, a gesture that might as well have been sign language for get off my lawn. “Have you received any?”

  “Not yet. I’m sure it will twat at any moment.”

  Using Twitter to send and receive messages from the Platypus had been an act of genius, if Steve did say so himself. Twitter boasted five hundred million accounts sending up to three hundred million tweets a day. It added up to an overwhelming amount of data flying across the Internet, 140 characters at a time. The typhoon of content was a perfect place for hiding messages, especially if they corresponded with a code held only by the receiver and the sender. Get in the kitchen and make me some pie might be an innocuous quote from a TV show, but if Steve sent it from his account, @MonstaMush, to @TheMadPlatypus, his lovely machine would know it was time to return to the launch point.

  There were over a thousand such tweet-based commands stored in the Platypus’s memory. Steve had programmed his baby to surface periodically and log on to the Internet by using a communication method ubiquitous throughout the United States: cell-phone signals.

  Even though the UUV’s sonar-dampening “fur” made it practically invisible to sonar, the U.S. naval assets in the area still made surfacing dangerous; Steve had to limit the number of surface trips the Platypus could make.

  He called up a bathymetry map of Lake Michigan. Different bands of color represented different depths: reds and yellows for zero to 50 feet, greens into greenish-blue to 150 feet, blues through 300. There hadn’t been a color for depths beyond 300 feet, because Lake Michigan’s average depth was 279 feet. So Steve had programmed more: blue-purple to purple for 300 to 500 feet, purple to dark purple for 501 to 800 feet, dark purple to black for the deepest spots the lake had to offer.

  The Platypus’s destination? The blackest spot on the map. Bo Pan’s coordinates were in a spot known as Chippewa Basin, the very bottom of which was 923 feet deep.

  “How solid are these coordinates?” Steve asked. “I’ll program a search field. It would help to know how far out I have to plot for.”

  The old man shrugged. He shrugged a lot.

  “I only know what I have been told,” he said. “It is the same location the American navy has. That means ROVs and divers will be in the area. You had better hope your claims of near invisibility are accurate.”

  Steve rocked slightly back and forth. He tried to control his excitement. Not just excitement, but also fear, stress and anxiety. He believed he’d constructed the most advanced UUV ever created. Manufacturers and fabricators in a dozen countries had provided parts, had unknowingly helped him build the Platypus. He’d had a huge budget to make his creation, but there was another organization with a far bigger checkbook: the U.S. Navy.

  The navy had remotely operated vehicles. The navy had unmanned vehicles. The navy had some of the best minds in the world creating, designing, building. But the navy had one limitation that Steve did not — the navy itself. Proposals, funding, approvals, bidding, construction checks, supervised tests… dozens of administrative layers and miles of red tape that slowed down the creative process. Steve suffered through none of those things.

  The Platypus incorporated the best components. Some were prototypes from other designers, things that had yet to enter beta testing, let alone hit the market. Others, Steve had designed himself. The biggest advantage, however, was that Steve had designed the Platypus for one purpose and one purpose only — military contractors had to make machines that could do multiple things in order to serve multiple masters.

  If Steve’s creation went up against black-budget DARPA machines, which would come out on top? Could he really out-invent the world’s largest buyer of weapons?

  Bo Pan hawked a loogie, spat it into his cup with a wet plop. He smiled. “You seem nervous.”

  Steve felt instantly insulted. “Nervous? No. Just excited. Well, a little nervous. We don’t know what the navy has. If something goes wrong with the Platypus and it can’t surface to send a signal, we’d never hear from it again. We’d never know what went wrong.”

  The old man’s smile faded. “Do you know how much money was spent on your machine?”

  Steve shook his head.

  “Guess,” Bo Pan said. “I am curious if you are even close.”

  Steve didn’t really want to think about how much money he’d wasted if his machine had failed and was lying on the lake bottom, but he closed his eyes and mentally walked through what he knew about the components and the materials used to make them.

  “Um… eighteen million?”

  Bo Pan laughed. The sound made Steve more nervous. Something about that laugh made his stomach pinch, made him afraid.

  “Eighteen million,” Bo Pan said, shaking his head. “You have no idea. The cost is one hundred and ten million. Rounded down.”

  A staggering sum. It didn’t seem real. It seemed like Monopoly money.

  “One hundred and ten million,” Bo Pan repeated. “If your machine does not return, Steve, then you have wasted not only our investment in you, but also all that money.”

  Steve turned back to his computer. Still no tweet from the Platypus.

  One hundred and ten million dollars…

  “I’ll write some more code,” he said. “I’ll make sure we are not discovered.”

  Bo Pan nodded. “That is good. You do that while I make some calls.”

  The old man pulled out his cell phone. He lay back in his bunk and let Steve get to work.

  CLEAR YOUR MIND

  Margaret tried not to hold her breath as she watched Tim Feely slice into Candice Walker’s brain. She was right, she had to be right; it was the only thing that fit the observed data.

  Tim separated the left and right hemispheres, then made horizontal slices across each. When he was done, the thing that had made up Walker’s personality, stored her memories, comprised everything that she was, lay on the dissection tray like a pair of strange, gray loaves of sliced bread.

  Tim looked up. “I don’t know what to make of this. In the other infection victims, including Petrovsky, the crawlers create fibrous structures in the brain. I found hydras in Walker’s brain, but none of those structures. She didn’t have any crawlers in there, either — melted or otherwise. Petrovsky’s brain was packed with the things. Aside from the presence of the hydras, Walker’s brain looks perfectly normal.”

  Margaret felt an electric surge of possibility, powerful enough to make her fingers and toes tingle. She leaned in and eye-tracked through her HUD controls, calling up magnification, labeling and enhancement. The visor showed Candice’s brain in far greater detail than Margare
t could have seen with the naked eye.

  She looked for the visible, telltale signs of brain infection: a latticework of crawler threads, each thinner than a human hair, spreading through the obifrontal cortex, amygdala, and hippocampus.

  There weren’t any.

  Tim seemed dumbfounded. “Walker tested positive for cellulose. I found hundreds of crawlers in her spinal column alone. Why didn’t her crawlers make it to her brain?”

  Margaret didn’t know, but one hypothesis loomed large. Her heart hammered, her face felt flushed. She heard herself breathing rapidly.

  “Tim, is there any evidence of the black rot in Walker’s brain?”

  He shook his head. “No, none.” He looked at Walker’s body. “In fact, I haven’t observed any apoptosis on her at all — according to the normal timeline, we should be seeing that by now. She’s just not rotting like Petrovsky and the other infected victims.”

  Melted crawlers… no rot… no growths in the brain…

  The observations pointed to one obvious conclusion, a glorious conclusion.

  “Candice was infected by crawlers, but not under their control,” Margaret said. “The hydras are clearly different, and we have to assume they stopped the crawlers from colonizing her brain.”

  “Calm down, Red Hot Momma,” Tim said. “You look like you might pass out. Take it easy.”

  She turned on him, so fast she almost stumbled.

  “I can’t calm down, Tim. Don’t you see what this means?”

  Margaret drew in a sharp breath, held it, tried to stop her body from shaking. For years she had dealt with the hard truth that there was no known method of preventing the alien infection from penetrating new hosts, from hijacking stem cells to make whatever bioparts it needed. If her new hypothesis about Candice Walker was right, there might finally be a way.

  “Your engineered yeast,” she said. “You’ve taken genetic information out of the crawlers, put it into the yeast. You can get your yeast to produce the catalyst that kills the crawlers.”

  “Sure,” Tim said. “But like I told you, the catalyst kills the yeast as well. So it’s a dead end.”

  “Was a dead end. The hydras survive an environment that kills the crawlers, Tim. If we can figure out how they survive it—”

  “Maybe we can put that survival trait in the yeast,” Tim finished, his eyes wide with renewed energy. “Then we could generate huge colonies of yeast that would produce the catalyst… an endless supply of something that kills crawlers dead.”

  Margaret reached out, grabbed Tim’s shoulder. If they weren’t in the suits, she might have kissed the man.

  “Tim, I think the hydras made Candice immune to the infection, to the crawlers, to all of it. We still don’t know what the hydras are, what else they can do to a host, but if we can figure out how they survive when crawlers die, and if we can reproduce that ability… maybe we can make everyone immune.”

  GET LICKED

  Chief Petty Officer Orin Nagy didn’t know much about the original infection.

  Like everyone else in the world, he’d been glued to the news when that disaster hit. He’d watched reports of Detroit’s blistering end and the aftermath that followed. He’d heard the endless public service announcements hammering home the acronym “T.E.A.M.S.” Like everyone else, he knew the methods of transmission: get infected by a spore, or get licked — yes, literally licked — by a host.

  But since then, God had created new vectors.

  Orin didn’t have to lick people. All he had to do was touch them. He didn’t know how he knew this, he just knew. Touch them, and a few days later, they would be his kind.

  An even greater illustration of God’s perfection and power? He didn’t have to always touch people directly — if he touched a surface, then someone else touched it shortly after, that alone could be enough to spread God’s love.

  Soon, the humans would come for him, try and make him take the cellulose test, but he wouldn’t be where they expected him to be. It was time to wander. Surrounded by a ship full of people who wanted to kill him, he would stay out of sight as best he could. He would avoid attracting attention.

  The longer he went without being caught, the more people he could touch.

  CHEMISTRY

  Before Tim could find out how the hydras survived when the crawlers melted, he had to identify what, exactly, melted those crawlers.

  To solve this puzzle, he had to find the key differences between two human corpses. Both bodies had come from an identical environment: the Los Angeles. Although there were significant variables — one was male, the other female, with additional differences in size and genetic background — for all intents and purposes those two bodies were the same. One had suffered the infection’s final-stage brain modification, the other had not.

  That made Tim’s job theoretically simple: all he had to do was identify something in Candice Walker that was not in Charlie Petrovsky.

  He stood alone in the analysis module, running tests on blood, tissues, organs, even bone. Chemical breakdown, mass spectrometry, DNA analysis, any test he and Margaret could think of for which they had the equipment onboard — and they had a lot of equipment.

  She checked in with him every fifteen to twenty minutes, a hyper Latina with the newfound energy of a chipmunk on meth. She was working with the hydras, trying to figure out what they were. Just another Orbital weapon? Or, possibly, something else.

  Margaret wasn’t the same person who had arrived, what, just a scant fifteen hours earlier? She’d shown up ready to work, certainly, but not like this: now she had a nuclear reactor for a soul that made her tireless, unceasing.

  Tim wanted her more than ever. He’d worshipped Margaret Montoya from afar, mesmerized by the intellect he’d seen reflected in the words and recordings of her Detroit research. The word genius didn’t do her justice.

  His visor display started flashing an icon: the blinking, red exclamation point of an alert. Tim eye-tracked to it, called it up.

  Four hours after he’d begun his comparative analysis between Petrovsky and Walker, the Brashear’s computer had identified a significant discrepancy in mass spectrometry. Walker’s blood showed a massive spike of an unidentified chemical compound that wasn’t present in Petrovsky, not even in trace amounts.

  Whatever it was, she had a ton of it in her system. Was this compound related to the hydras? Was it the reason the hydras lived and the crawlers died? Or was it why Walker didn’t suffer the black rot?

  And why was this mystery chemical so concentrated in her blood?

  Her blood…

  Petrovsky’s tissue…

  “Fuck,” Tim said. “Why didn’t I think of that before?”

  He activated his comms. “Margo, you there?”

  She answered immediately. “Yes, Tim. You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Shittyballs, I’m way more than fine. I need you to find the least-rotted bit of Petrovsky.”

  “Uh, sure,” she said. “You want to tell me why?”

  “You’ll see soon enough.”

  At least he hoped she would.

  THE LOS ANGELES

  The stateroom felt ice cold, but Steve Stanton couldn’t stop sweating.

  He sat at the tiny table, drinking Diet Coke and eating Doritos, hoping his two laptops would give some signal. One hundred and ten million dollars… was that investment sitting dead on the bottom of Lake Michigan?

  Bo Pan spent his time either sleeping or on his cell phone. Steve didn’t know who Bo Pan was talking to, but the conversations revolved around more aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces than one man could possibly have. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Bo Pan was sharing information about Steve’s work, getting details about the activities of the nearby navy ships — Steve and the Platypus had their code; Bo Pan and his handlers obviously had theirs.

  “Steve, it is late,” Bo Pan said. “You told me your machine would contact us an hour ago.” The old man lay in his bunk, sp
it cup in hand, bushy eyebrows framing black, emotionless eyes.

  “Relax,” Steve said. He tried to sound confident. “It might be staying below because of high levels of navy activity. Sometimes this is more an art than a science.”

  Bo Pan picked his nose. “I see,” he said as he wiped a booger on his jeans. “Then perhaps we should have spent all that money to get you an art degree.”

  The coldness of Bo Pan’s voice made Steve swallow, which drove a flake of Dorito into his throat. Steve tried to wash it back with Diet Coke, but coughed before he could get it down. He managed to turn his head and spray caramel-colored foam onto the wall instead of onto his computers.

  Bo Pan huffed. “Breakfast of champions. I can’t wait to see how you handle your dinner.”

  Steve managed to flip the old man the bird as he brought his coughing under control.

  Bo Pan seemed… different. He’d always acted like a beaten-down laborer, a man who’d spent his life taking shit from everyone. Since the Mary Ellen left the harbor, however, he seemed more self-assured, in control.

  No, no… Steve was just stressing out, imagining things. Bo Pan was Bo Pan. Had to be. It was Steve who had changed. In all his years of work, pursuing whatever development he thought might add to the Platypus’s effectiveness, he’d felt invulnerable. He’d felt brilliant. None of that had been real. This, however, was reality: a boat that never sat still, an old man watching his every move, a machine that refused to respond, and a nation’s investment in him about to go bust.

  He didn’t feel brilliant anymore. He felt incompetent.

  Bo Pan pushed himself up on one arm.

  “Steve, it seems you are telling me you don’t know where your creation is, but I know you cannot be telling me that.”

  A coldness in that voice, and steel. No sorry, sorry this time. Steve shivered.

  “The sensor algorithms determine where the Platypus goes, so it isn’t necessarily moving in a straight line,” he said. “If it has to go around or through anything, that causes delays, and if it sees any American UUVs or divers, it knows to swim away and come back later. Could be any minute now. Or it could be hours. The UUV is programmed to not be seen, Bo Pan. I can’t—”