by Chris Hepler
I frown. "Is that tactic likely to be effective?"
"Unless Lorenz has the long green, yeah. Cho charges hourly, like everyone. Can you imagine the pricks who'd run out the clock on this?"
My thoughts flash to Infinity. She'll be in the lab tonight, the one where so much of this began. Not just VIHPS, but my work, my goals, the wiring built into my tissues and the energy that makes me me.
Infinity doesn't look very much like Emma Horiyama. I once worked with Emma in those labs, even lived with her briefly before she told me that my research into qi was scaring her. I replied that if this scared her, she'd better leave because I was going to change the world, one way or another. Infinity is taller than Emma, harder, all angles and sharp remarks.
And brave.
"Your Honor," says Cho, "motion to compel: the defendant has never fully acquiesced to our requests to access their laboratory in Reston, claiming at least three distinct lines of argument. First, they said it was not safe, then they cited trade secrets, now they are claiming routine data destruction wiped their records…."
One of the BRHI lawyers closes his body language, and I'm glad that Kern hasn't hesitated before acting. He and Infinity had better be in the ABEL lab tonight and have it evidence-free by morning, or who knows what they'll find?
As Cho goes on, and Campion's team claims something or other, I glance at the virtual Lorenz. He has said nothing audible. He is a wan, pale ghost of the man who had made last week's announcement. I stare. No matter how remote he seems, he's as predictable as any animal.
Bayat cracks the gavel. I tune back in again. "What is this, early lunch?"
"They need to verify records," says the helpful photojournalist. She aims her camera at herself, and I realize it's time to shut up and go.
I stand and slip my way through the crowd, scanning faces, guessing flow. Lorenz's legal team takes a moment to pack up their papers and device, and I delay by looking as if I'm tying my shoe. When I come up again, Cho has joined the foot traffic. I make a path, and when Cho reaches the doors, I take the opportunity to hold one and usher the lawyer out with the other hand. I can't make skin contact, not yet.
I keep my eyes down, watching feet, matching pace. I have to look harmless for another thirty seconds, to get clear. There wasn't a watch-mage visible on the way in, but that just means he's good at his job. There will be a detection net up, waiting to be tripped by the first function. I'm betting it is only indoors.
Cho's assistant is handing him back his phone by the metal detectors now, and I know I don't have time to snag my own. I have to get the sleeve off my tablet, now before Cho gets on the move again and into a vehicle. The damn attachments cost a few bucks, so they have proximity alarms on them like bookstore novels. I try to urge along the guard popping the plastic bolts, but I hold off making trouble because that is a fast way to nowhere. Nowhere is failure.
I look over the guard's shoulder just as Cho vanishes out the door.
I pour on the speed as much as I can in the crowd and emerge into the sun only to find Cho has, mercifully, not gotten far. He's on the marble steps of the court, surrounded by genuine media that sticks to him in an ever-larger clump as more of them come out the door. It's good for immobilizing him and also for producing an impenetrable wall of bodies.
Cho talks. I don't listen. I need a story, an excuse, as simple as brushing a nonexistent bug off him or a clumsy faux stumble because I am a tangle-footed camera hound, and gosh, I didn't mean to make skin contact to fire the function—
The function. I hastily feel for the tacks in my pocket and put one in my ear while Cho talks. Then, one up the sleeve I wear loose so I can reach my own elbow and one on the top of my head.
"That's all for today. No more questions, thank you—"
Cho is moving, and I need one more tack. I insert it into the side of my wrist once, twice, three times, drawing little dots of blood as I get it wrong, and I start the locator function, attempting to balance power without the calming pulse of a dialed-up web.
"Mr. Cho? Mr. Cho, hi—" I begin and feel the tack sink in correctly. "Gary Rosberg, 'The Incisive Amateurs.' We're a little blog from up the coast—"
"I'm sorry. I told everybody that's all for today," Cho repeats.
"This is also personal," I find myself saying, and I can tell by the expression that I've bought a half-second as Lorenz's counsel reconsiders. Cho's associates, all in suits, are also staring at me, and I'm trying not to think about one of them being a bodyguard. "I wanted to thank you for representing the infected," I blurt. "I used to know one."
"Really? Would I know the name?"
Ulan, I don't say. "You might, but that's not important. It just means a lot to me that she might be compensated for her suffering. I… I don't even know where she is now. She's essentially on the run."
"I'm sorry to hear that," Cho says, and I know what he'll say in the next breath. "But I have to go, so if you want an interview, call the office—"
"I only wanted to shake your hand. You're defending real people, you know." My fingers meet Cho's, and they clasp.
"I know," says Cho.
"Tell me, how are you feeding him?"
Cho blinks. "We have volunteers. If there's nothing else—"
"Forget it," I say. Cho looks at me strangely as the pulse-points fire.
Bang.
Cho and his attendants leave in a group. I permit myself a small smile. There is work to be done, and it could still prove to be grueling, but it is not something to be feared.
The middle game has begun.
21 - INFINITY
August 24th
You know what sucks? Vipe senses and the smell of bleach. The Advanced Biophysics Experimental Laboratory is full of it. Worse, science is officially a thing I don't know my way around. All I remember from school is wearing a lot of protective gear and doing agonizingly methodical measurements. I asked to be excused for religious reasons, and when they gave me a form to say which religion, I wrote down "spontaneity." Then, I tried to prove my faith.
The security booth in front of the lab is empty. Kern goes to shut the cameras down after showing me to the first decontamination chamber (first?) and telling me to wash. I take off my clothes, stand under a decon shower that feels like fizzy, whipped cream against my skin and carefully follow all the icon-heavy instructions on the wall. I'm taping down the legs and sleeves of the disposable paper scrubs when Kern knocks.
"Did this project have a name?" I ask when I'm ready.
"Skia," he says. "Means 'shade,' as in yin qi being the shady side of a mountain. Should have been 'Pandora' if you ask me, but hey, you can't always be eerily prophetic."
I don't get whatever reference he just made and climb awkwardly into the heavy, plastic hazmat suit. I've never worn one before. I twitch a bit when Kern uncoils a yellow air hose from the wall and plugs it into my armpit.
My helmet unfogs instantly from the rush of air, and the suit inflates, a hard, swollen shell around me. My hearing is suddenly consumed by the electric whir of the fan's motor, covering even the sound of my own breath. In one orange, rubber glove, I hold the burn bag, strangely out of place in the sterile environment.
Kern waves his keychip at the second door to let us both in.
"How do we kill the stuff?" I ask. Kern doesn't answer, so I repeat the question, yelling to be heard over the roar of air.
He adjusts the volume on the radio to be heard. "Used to be, we didn't even know." He hefts a box of decontaminant and breaks open the seals. It's bluish goo. "This is new. Don't get any on you. It makes Drano look like water."
I grab my share, letting the negative air pressure of the level 5 lab suck me inside. My infection improves my sense of balance, but sometimes it's creepy. It's like my body does things on its own or does them with only a tiny push from me.
I stop at the large, stainless steel sink, where Kern leaves the goo. He walks into an enormous freezer at the far side of the room, and around then, I re
alize how ridiculous this is. I need to get a sample we can match to Lorenz's infection. But what the hell do I know about bio-evidence? All I know about viruses is that it isn't good to get one, and a fat lot of help that's been. I mean, I've seen some late night forensic shows, so maybe I could check where the sink eventually spills out. But Kern obviously thinks the goo will destroy any chance at DNA typing; otherwise, he wouldn't use it. I need something else and fast.
"What should I do?" I yell.
"Start with the tissue samples. We got them, but we need to wash the guck."
Kern motions to another walk-in freezer. I cross the room, looking at the signs that this lab had once been an office like any other. Someone printed out an online comic, a vampire trying to shave without being able to see himself in the mirror. It's taped up on a cabinet over an electron microscope and a pad full of jotted notations that I don't understand. It's math, it's physics, a secret language I never learned. That means I am far from welcome here.
My breath comes short and shallow. This is the room where a creature was born that now lives by the millions inside of me. I can't kill it. I can't run from it or even confess my fear of it. This room has one purpose now and that is to study and destroy me the moment I utter a word of the truth.
My steps slow as I near the freezer. The air hose blows too loud for me to hear anything behind me. I look back frequently: traitor's looks.
If he could see me now. At moments like this, there is only one person I ever mean by "he." I've practiced cover-ups since I was nine and the traitor's game since I was fourteen. Born and bred in the betrayal patch, motherfucker.
Indecision hits me. Can I actually get away with sabotaging this? I thought somehow I'd turn this against BRHI, perhaps switch a label somewhere, but Kern is taking charge. Now, he's removing refrigerated sample jars by the armload and setting them by the sink.
I open the freezer door.
Inside, on the plastic shelving, is visible blood. Nothing tasty—congealed, unappetizing residue. Like a package of ground chuck, some plastic bag of someone left this calling card behind. But the bags themselves are gone.
Tissue samples. This is what becomes of the bodies I last saw in a hot van.
"Double bag the drips, stick them in the biohaz boxes, then autoclave them. We'll drop everything by the path-incinerator on the way out." Kern says the words way too easily. I think maybe "path" is for "pathogen" and don't know what an autoclave is.
To avoid looking nervous, I shove trays into the super-Ziploc disposal bags, carefully reading and trying to remember the names on the labels—Alta, Delano, Kaplan, Ulan, Kern—the last the only indication they are the names of scientists, not victims.
A few have notations, handwritten scrawls that are stone-cold psycho. "Subject torpidity reached in thirty-two days without blood," says one. I can only imagine the terror of the woman, captured live, probably still clueless to her condition. She'd be imprisoned, slowly starving to unconsciousness and then, much later, death. Another note is simpler: "Reaction to fire consistent with computer model." I gingerly touch the petri dish with black specks. Is that charred skin from a vector who was cremated? Or burned alive?
"When you're done with that, we'll need all the computers bricked." Kern opens vial after vial into the sink, coated in blue chemicals, and my stomach churns as I try to figure out if there is any evidence I can salvage before it's all gone.
I toss the last of the tissue samples into boxes, packed up like picnic coolers for the incinerator. Holding my hands under the decon nozzle, I wash them in a stream of bleach, then approach the four computers on the far wall.
"That I can do," I say. "Let me at it."
"We've already done the F-prot office computers," Kern says as he works. "But no one's been in here since Lorenz's announcement."
I flick a button, logging into the network with the password Kern gave me—which I memorize just in case, but it'll probably be changed within the hour. I find myself opening the files for project Skia. I read quickly, trying to look like I'm deleting.
I need to distract him. "Is this where it happened? With Ulan and all that?"
"I was right over there by the diamond slicer."
"What was she doing? I mean, how did it…."
"She had a petri dish with a cross-section of mouse brain in it. It was brimming with EBL, and she was bombarding it with yin qi. Should have killed anything, if you ask me." Kern has stopped moving. "Then… I guess she was tired or inattentive because she reached for the dish, and there was this pop like a gunshot, and the dish was plastic fragments everywhere, and some got through the suit into her hand."
I cover my right hand with my left. "And you didn't quarantine her?"
"Our specialist biomancer fried her. Like I said, no virus should've survived that. And we hit her with the decon shower. We cleaned the wound, and I drove her over to Helix Health for a gamma globulin test. Turns out dosing EBL-4 in pure yin is like trying to squash an anthill by pouring sugar on it. You know what the only clue was?"
I stop staring at him. The screen has what I want. "What?"
"I asked if she was feeling okay, and she said, 'Just a little hungry.'" Kern's voice comes out slow and falters a little. "So, I took her to get waffles. Problem solved, right?"
"I'm sorry." I listen to the air blower in my suit as the silence stretches on. I take control. "Looks like you've got a wipeout program right here. Check back in ten." He turns away. Score. He's too distracted to question the plan. It helps to think of Kern as an enemy, but I'm hard enough that I don't need help.
I call up each machine on the network and copy the overwriting software onto each. I fire it off on all but one and start to sift. Then, I hit the proverbial wall. I don't have the training to wade through the "levels of antibody binding to the soluble antigens," and the "carboxylic acid added to the phenoxybenzyl moiety." I need something that Lorenz's lawyer can recite in a minute and mean, "BRHI invented this thing, hid its existence by killing everyone who caught it, and goddamn it, at some point, they've got to pay."
In just five and a half minutes, Kern comes my way. Quickly, I hit SEND, hoping I can get at least a page or two of incriminating documents. I hit the touch-screen, covering the transmission with a window showing the progress on the other computers.
"Don't waste time deleting," he says. "Just write over the drive."
"Way ahead of you," I say. "See?"
"You do this a lot?"
Fake smile. "I like privacy. You want to wipe the last one?"
With a few key strokes and a plastic-covered thumb against the screen, he does. It leaves a print, the grease of some hot agent, probably.
I bite my tongue. Even with the air blowing inside my suit, I'm sweating. I wonder if this is how the victims of serial killers feel in their last moments. Kern busies himself on the other side of the room, totally unconcerned about whatever specters are floating in my head.
I can do this. I've lied about worse. But the truth always comes out, doesn't it? Not at first, but today I'm pretty far past first.
I blank the last machine. I have no idea if the computer transmitted anything useful. I still need a good skewer to wound BRHI.
"Get the rest of those vials. I'll go over the equipment."
I need an idea and, the way my heart is beating, also a horse tranquilizer. I walk to the sink. Kern is going over the counters with a goo-covered sponge. I pour vials down the sink, following each with a glob of blue, then check behind me.
Kern is spraying bleach from a hand-pumped spritzer onto the microscopes and centrifuges. I have a chance.
As I pour out the contents of the next flask, I splash a bit of one sample on the center of my left glove. When Kern turns back, I clench my hand, and the bloody spot vanishes.
After that, it's easy. Kern finishes the counters and pulls out a sink trap. He coats both sides with blue. He's thorough but not suspicious. I go for the documents, stuffing notebooks and memos into the burn bag. I m
ake it back to the level 2 area and look at my glove, hoping that handling the papers hasn't brushed away the trace of European Bat Lyssavirus.
With my blower unhooked now, I can hear Kern at the incinerator. I snatch the dry-erase marker from the sign-in board and draw it across my palm, the plastic cap scraping just a little out. I drop the marker and cap silently into my pile of discarded clothes. Soon, those will go on, and the cap will go into my pocket.
My eyes water when I take off the suit, and it isn't just from the chemical stench. I keep a tight hand over my pocket as we visit the pathological incinerator at the back of the building. In go the burn bags. As the flames flare around them, I repeat the research team's names in my head. If there is one thing I can do, it is memorizing.
Alta, Delano, Kaplan, Ulan, Kern.
It will have to be enough.
22 - MORGAN
September 1st
I stare at my Lemon Coke and my cigarettes, wondering if they're both defective. I turn the package of Menthols over in my hands, trying to remember if I've seen anything about the company lowering the nicotine level or something. It's the last indignity I need.
I've gotten used to the police around me, a feat that has taken nearly all the patience, diplomacy, and milk of human kindness I have left. My initial night in their custody was a mess that rivaled waiting in an understaffed emergency room. First, there was a receptionist, then a sergeant, then desk workers, all saying to stay with them. Just as it had seemed I was getting somewhere, the shift change was up, and I had to re-explain everything to the next cop who came on duty. Gunmen entered my house and killed my friends and my dogs. Yes, I am employed. No, there were actually two houses. No, I do not have medical documentation of my condition on me, but I can bench-press a motorcycle if you like.
That last did not go over well. I am cordial but not popular with the police at the station. They don't look forward to bodyguarding famous targets who have already been through one assassination attempt. Some didn't believe me, but when one of them put a book down loudly, I jumped. Word got around: I was no fake.
