“So it can’t be weaponized?” asked Vinny.
Arthur spoke up. “No, the Devil Plague wouldn’t do much to anyone now. It has done all the damage it was going to do more than ten thousand years ago. There is a kind of limit. It will only put so much of a load on the physiological system, and then it just stops replicating itself and goes inert. In fact, it’s everywhere even now. You can find it in everything in a dormant state, in low concentrations. It only flares up occasionally, almost at random. And it’s actually fairly easy to generate resistance. In the real world, we demonstrated that every eukaryotic organism on Earth has enough residual immunity to make it just a nuisance disease. No worse than chicken pox. It was a dead end, except as a research subject.”
Elise picked up the thread smoothly. “Yes, it seems like we – humans – got lucky. Developed a certain amount of immunity. So we turned to the Eden Plague. Of course we didn’t call it that then, but once we figured it out, the name was inevitable. But this one is certainly a designed organism, probably by humans. I’d guess the Soviets. They did a lot of research on biologicals, on phages. They have medical phage clinics even now, to treat superbug bacterial infections. Phages to kill bacteria.”
I stuck my hand up like a kid in class. “How come you don’t think the Eden Plague is extraterrestrial too?”
She replied, “Because it looks like it was built directly from the Devil Plague. Genetically engineered with known techniques. You need the poison to design the antidote. That’s the only reason it was even possible, because they had isolated and purified the proto-DP to study it in its non-mutated state.”
“So Durgan was hoping this was his bio-weapon, but it wasn’t. It seemed to us that the Eden Plague was specifically designed to reverse the Devil Plague process. To restore certain organisms – in this case humans – to their former state. And it almost works! With a few years and a billion dollars I’m pretty sure it could be perfected. We’ve come a long way in genetic engineering the past few decades, since they must have made this.”
She sounded so enthusiastic, but smart as she was, I don’t think she had thought it through as far as I had. I said, “Even in its current imperfect form, it seems like it is a cure of a lot of diseases. So what if the patient has to eat a lot of food. That’s a small price to pay for saving someone’s life or curing a kid of muscular dystrophy. But if word gets out, and it’s in short supply, the whole world will be after it. It could plunge us into World War Three.”
“Oh.” A look of horror came over her face. “Do you really think so? But it would be free to everyone! Even now, it could be passed from person to person. It’s only contagious through bodily fluids...”
I went on, relentlessly. “But people in the government would want to control anything so valuable. Sell it, keep it for themselves or their own citizens first, or blackmail others with it…or finish developing it as a super-soldier serum. No matter how you slice it, it’s power. And word of it would wreck the medical establishment overnight. No need for doctors or hospitals or drug companies anymore, when perfect health is free. Millions thrown out of work, trillions of dollars of value lost, the stock markets crashing, economic depression.”
“But it will free up mankind to do so much more!” she cried.
“Not until after a lot of chaos. And how about overpopulation?” asked our resident pessimist, Alan the Skull. “If everyone is healthy and no one dies…”
“Yes, that’s a problem,” Arthur interjected. “The perfected Eden Plague would probably lower fertility, but not the version we have now. Quite the opposite, in fact, because healthy men and women will likely have more children.”
A nagging in the back of my head finally came to the fore. “Wait a minute…this is the downside to society, to public disclosure, uncontrolled information. But Elise, you said there was a downside for the company. What is it?”
“You haven’t figured it out yet?” she asked me.
“I think I have part of it…it’s about the mental health, isn’t it? And conscience?”
“Exactly. The longer you have it, the more emotionally stable and also altruistic you seem to become. I’m not saying they are the same thing, but this version of the virus causes what we call the ‘virtue effect.’ Many people that get it will not be able to even contemplate making offensive war, or committing violent crimes. Even emotional violence or oppression will become harder and harder to do. It doesn’t inhibit abstract thinking, as far as we know. It just creates an overactive conscience. Probably too much.”
“And - ” I broke in excitedly, “ - and with people’s fear of disease and violence removed, people who don’t have the Eden Plague will find it hard to oppress or bully people either. But the bigwigs won’t want to give up their status, their ability to oppress people or order them around. And a world full of Edens wouldn’t be intimidated or controllable. It would be the end of the power structure as we know it! Even if it was kept secret. In fact, it’s a ticking time bomb. Eventually it will come to light, if they keep it around. Someone will talk, or use it to cure someone they love, or take it for themselves…and anyone that does, becomes the enemy of the power structure. Automatic excommunication.”
“Ahem…” Roger cleared his throat. “That is correct. I believe carriers will be treated with jealousy, suspicion, hatred and fear. They will be targets of oppression, quarantine, imprisonment and perhaps extermination. The four infected people here may be the only carriers left in the entire world. Perhaps there are others, hiding somewhere, in Russia or other parts of Asia. Or perhaps the Soviets wiped it out, all but those samples that someone probably stole during the chaos when their protocols and controls collapsed.”
“That will happen if only a small number of people have it. If millions have it…they can’t quarantine and oppress everyone!” said Elise passionately.
“They’ll try. It threatens the established order,” Roger answered dispassionately, then fell quiet.
We sat there in silence for a time, listening to the rushing of air and the humming of wheels on the highway. We were nine people in a moving convoy connected by radio and by the enormity of what we possessed. We might hold the salvation of humanity inside our bodies. Or perhaps its ruin. I realized I didn’t want that responsibility. I also realized that I didn’t have any alternative.
-15-
After a while I asked. “You said four people? What about you two, Arthur and Roger? Why don’t you have the Eden Plague? And why does Elise?”
“She got it by accident. Bobo the chimp bit her by accident - in play - but we kept that secret for a while. Once they found out, they kept her confined to the island. We didn’t infect ourselves because we didn’t want to be stuck there too. We also didn’t want to have everyone carrying it in case we had to do something ruthless. It is ironic. And there still might have been some unknown problem. What if some years from infection, it suddenly made a horrible left turn – aging, cancer, immune system breakdown. Who could know?”
“But that’s all just guesses. What’s wrong with it for sure? Why isn’t it perfected?” Larry asked. “And can I still…you know…with a woman?”
Elise laughed. “Haven’t you been listening? Yes, and you’re fertile, too, if you want kids.”
I sat bolt upright.
Elise looked at me, wonderingly. Her hand had crept into mine, and now she gripped it hard, concerned.
I squeezed back and broke out in a big smile. “Never mind…it’s all good.” I relaxed back in the seat. I wasn’t going to talk about personal plans in front of seven extra people, but the thought kept going around and around in my head. If it healed everything else…it should have healed that too. We could have kids. A son to carry on my name, and the tradition of service. I couldn’t stop grinning.
“It’s not perfected because it’s not,” Arthur spoke up, sounding a bit cross. “Genetic engineering is complex and difficult. And I have to pee. Can we take a break?”
“Next truck stop,”
answered Zeke.
Thirty minutes later everyone had had a break and a takeout meal and was back on the road. I readied my next question, one I’d had from the start. “So Elise…why me, anyway?”
She laughed wryly. “Why anyone? It had to be someone. You had been in the special operations community. You still had your clearances. You had no family other than your father left alive. Only child, highly motivated, high moral index. And ruthless when the mission called for it. I was their first human test subject, but I wasn’t any kind of soldier. They wanted someone tough that could follow orders, but that wouldn’t go rogue. They wanted someone driven and ruthless because they thought the conscience problem could be overcome. At least, they wanted to test its limits. And you lived nearby. You popped out of the database. That’s pretty much it.”
“What database? The Air Force Personnel database would only show my service record and my retirement. You said ‘high moral index’ at my house…”
Then it came to me.
“Oh, that slimy bastard. Benchman. He collaborated. Turned over my medical records – broke his oath and my confidentiality. I should never have trusted him, I should have done what everyone in the service that wants to avoid trouble does, stay away from the shrinks. And…you saw my record, didn’t you?” I suddenly knew I was right – knew now why she seemed to know me back then.
“Yes, I saw your file. I’m sorry, it wasn’t like I could refuse to do what they told me right then. I just know they picked you out of some kind of pool of candidates. Then Jenkins said he’d do the recruiting, claimed he had the perfect approach. He came and got me, twisted my arm, you know the rest.”
“That approach got him killed.” I mulled that over, ran the checklist of open items in my mind. “Hmm…back to what you said earlier. How could they overcome the conscience ‘problem’?” I asked with faint sarcasm.
Elise answered, “Doctor Durgan had some ideas. He got drunk and bragged to me once. Electroshock. Brain surgery. Personality conditioning techniques, drugs…it might be possible. Eden Plague is subtle and gentle by comparison. It shapes you with a kind of aversion therapy. The more harmful you yourself believe what you are doing is, the harder it will be to do. It’s based on your own basic beliefs about right and wrong. So you can perform surgery if you believe you are helping someone, but you can’t make those same cuts if you believe you are killing them. Unless you think the killing is morally right. Really righteous.”
I digested that one for a few minutes, then asked another question. “One of you said most people infected would act better with emotional and mental health improvement…what about the other fraction?”
I felt Elise tense up beside me, and I looked at her. She dropped her eyes. “There are genetic wild cards, unpredictable effects. The EP isn’t perfect, and…maybe even a perfected EP wouldn’t fix everyone. Human brains and minds are just too complex. Our models predict some people, maybe people who are already mentally ill, psychopaths or sociopaths, wouldn’t be cured. The ones with no sense of right and wrong at all. Very few, but if millions were infected…”
I mused aloud. “So we could end up with some kind of amoral superman in charge of the uninfected fearful masses, claiming to ‘protect’ them. That’s always the way fascists take power. They claim patriotism; they say they are providing security. Play on people’s fear. Stalin did it, Hitler did it, McCarthy and Mao and Cheney did it…and he’d be a true believer! Maybe someone who really thought he was helping people by enslaving them, and killing us. With all the EP’s physiological advantages. Fascist psychopaths…it could make the Holocaust look mild by comparison.”
My eyes flicked toward Skull, in the front seat. I forced them away. He’d been a sniper. Not saying they were all bad, or even most, but a significant minority of snipers had serious problems coming back from war. Drawing a cold bead on enemy combatants, ending life after life from an impersonal distance, had to take a toll…unless he was already suited for it by a certain personality quirk. Unless he secretly liked it. Skull had wanted to execute the INS security, he’d wanted to liquidate the scientists…he’d put a gun to my chest.
I wondered what would happen if he got infected. Which way would his tightly-wound psyche turn? How long would he keep following Zeke’s orders? What if he decided Zeke wasn’t himself anymore, with the Eden Plague in him?
It was the same excuse uninfected humanity would use for wiping us out, or cutting our brains up, I realized. They would say we weren’t human anymore, and that would justify a whole legion of new Doctor Mengeles, the Nazi concentration camp experimenter. They would say our will was not our own, that we were some kind of monsters, when in reality, they were the monsters.
All you had to do was take a visit to Dachau or Auschwitz to see what kind of monsters humans could be.
Eventually it would come down to us against them, because by comparison, they were insane. Humanity had always been brutally selfish; one slip, trip and fall away from lynch-mob violence, from downright evil. It wouldn’t take much of a breakdown in society to push them all across that line.
Because they were now the weaker species, so they would be afraid of us, I realized. That fear would push them into it. When people feared something they hated it and wanted to destroy it.
I couldn’t say this in front of everyone. I didn’t know what Zeke’s state of mind was, or what Skull or Spooky or Larry would do. Because despite the theory, I knew that the Eden Plague didn’t compromise my free will, or theirs. It didn’t stop me being human. No more than being in love or hating someone or being afraid or winning the lottery did. It was just one more piece of life. But once we got where we were going, things in our makeshift army might fall apart. The center might not hold. The fate of humanity might rest on just how this little group, these eight people and I, handled the next few days.
Just then a cell phone rang.
Everyone looked around in confusion. A babble of voices came over the net.
“Shut up!” Zeke roared. “Where is it?”
Elise pulled the offending instrument out of a pocket. “I took it off of Karl…the guy that tried to shoot us.” She looked apologetic. “I didn’t know for sure who you people were!”
I grabbed it, still ringing. I looked at the incoming number, pulled out a marker, and wrote it on my arm. Then I opened it up, pulled the battery and sim card out. “Just a minute…” I wiped our prints off it, then waited for the next overpass. I threw the whole mess out and down at speed.
“Vinny, I took the caller’s number. If I use a disposable phone to call it, and they have a trace ready, how long do I have?”
Vinny answered, “At least thirty seconds, maybe a minute. After that, they will know what wireless cell you are calling from, which will snapshot our position within a couple of miles.”
“Thanks.” I put the battery in my last disposable phone, sat there thinking about what I would say. Then I dialed. “Someone call out at five second intervals please.”
Ring.
“Jenkins.” A middle-aged male voice, rich, self-assured.
My brain stuttered. I swallowed. I hoped I was wrong.
“Mister Jervis Andrew Jenkins the Third?” I asked.
“FIVE.”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Sir…I’m sorry about your son. I apologize for my part in his death.”
A silence.
“TEN.”
“Markis? Daniel Markis? You have to come in. Everything depends on it.”
“Mister Jenkins, we have the Plagues. Both of them. Leave us alone. I can’t let them be used for what you want.”
“FIFTEEN.”
“What is it that I want?” he asked with forced amusement.
Stalling.
“The Plagues are ticking time bombs, and only my restraint will keep them from exploding. Leave us alone.”
“TWENTY.”
“We recovered enough from the lab to restart the research.”
“It will
be too late. I’m hanging up now, before the trace. I truly am sorry about your son.”
“TWENTY-FIVE.”
His tone changed then, chill and vicious. “You son of a bitch, I’ll hunt you down for Andy’s sake, I swear to God I will –”
I hung up. Took the battery out. Handed it to Elise. “Throw this out, will you?” I massaged my throbbing temples. I had no doubt he would try to do as he said.
***
A little while after we crossed into West Virginia we made a last stop for gas and food, then turned northward onto a nondescript two-lane that looked like it had last been repaved in the Eisenhower administration. It wended its way up into the central Appalachians, through towns with names like Cornstalk and Trout and Cold Knob, where bony women in faded pioneer dresses or worn jeans and tee shirts put their hands with cigarettes on their hips and stared suspiciously at us; where hard-eyed men in John Deere and Caterpillar caps spat tobacco juice from their rocking chairs on their front porches or out of their pickup truck windows; where every rickety house had an American flag on an angled pole nailed to the front post, and every store, no matter what kind, added “Bait and Tackle” and “Guns and Ammunition” and “Beer and Cigarettes” to its signage.
West Virginia was the only state to actually secede from the Confederacy to the Union, and they took their patriotism seriously. So did every one of our band, though I was sure we all had our own ideas about how to apply it.
It was a far cry from the thin splash of freeway suburbia along the interstate, where smiling cashiers fat with fast food asked, “Would you like fries with that?” in deliberately flattened accents. I expected the sound of banjos to come wafting through our opened windows.
We drove at mountain road speeds, twenty to forty, until we turned off on an unmarked gravel track, still more or less northwards by the angle of the chill sunlight.
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