by Jeff Carlson
The first version of the vaccine was not so aggressive. It couldn’t be. It was able to build more of itself only by tearing apart its rival. Otherwise it would have been another plague. Ruth had taught it to recognize the unique structure of the plague’s heat engine, which it shared, and she had given it the ability to sense the fraction of a calorie of waste heat that the plague generated repeatedly as it constructed more of itself, but the first vaccine was always behind its brother. Smaller and faster than the plague, the earliest model of the vaccine was able to eradicate its prey, but only after the chase.
The final version of the vaccine surpassed all those weaknesses. It suffused their bodies like disease-specific antibodies, attacking the constant absorption of the machine plague before the plague nanos could activate.
Maybe the vaccine can be reprogrammed to make us immune to the new plague, too, Cam thought.
“I’m here,” he said into his headset, reaching up to knock on the cabin wall. Then he realized he wasn’t upwind of her home. What if it was leaking?
“Cam?” Her voice was muffled, wrapped inside her containment suit. “Where are you?”
“I’m at the wall,” he said, although he’d backed away from the small building. Her place was dark. Even in the daytime, in fact, it looked no different than the rest of their huts, except that this cabin had even fewer windows than most, just one in the small living room and another in Eric and Bobbi’s space. Ruth needed electricity at all hours, so they’d wired her room with more outlets than normal and left it with no openings to betray what was inside.
This hut was the secret heart of their village. Ruth actually slept in the front room, which lacked any privacy, but her bedroom was a clean lab partitioned with plastic sheeting. It was crude and inefficient — and it worked. Eric had been her closest bodyguard, a role that once belonged to Cam. He hadn’t been inside for months. There was never a good excuse since they’d upgraded the electrical lines, and he’d promised himself to leave her alone for Allison’s sake. Even so, he remembered sharing a cool glass of tea with Ruth and Eric, sitting on the living room floor beside the other man but acutely aware of Ruth’s narrow bedroll and the open-faced cupboard she used to store her clothes, her toothbrush, a lipstick, a book. The tidy space had been full of the little personal things he never saw anymore.
“Is there anyone with you?” she asked.
Cam glanced over his shoulder, suddenly uncomfortable with where she was going. “It’s just me,” he said.
“Can you switch channels? I want to talk alone.”
“Greg?” he asked his headset, and the former Army Ranger sergeant said, “This is bullshit. You stay on the line.”
Other voices filled the frequency. “He’s right!” Owen shouted, as another man said, “We let you live here. We took you in when nobody else wanted anything to do with nanotech and now you’re going to hide something from—”
Cam shut off his radio, leaving the headset in place. Then he stepped closer to the cabin and rapped his knuckles against the wood. “Can you hear me? Ruth?”
There was a noise from another part of the hut, a thump, thump like someone convulsing on the floor.
“Ruth!” he yelled, imagining Patrick or Michael loose in the cabin. He jogged alongside the building to the front room before he realized he couldn’t fire through the window or break down the door. If he did, the new plague would have him, too. But what if the infected men grabbed Ruth or tore her suit? Cam turned on his flashlight and aimed the beam inside. “Hey!” he yelled. The plastic on the window distorted the light. He couldn’t see more than the long shape of the cupboards, so he banged on the glass, hoping to distract anyone at the door to Ruth’s lab. “Hey!”
The thumping increased, an uneven drumbeat. It sounded like someone was thrashing back and forth. Cam also heard a woman moan inside. Linda? There were other voices hollering across the village. He saw another flashlight. Then he realized Ruth was shouting in the other end of the hut.
“Cam? Cam, I’m okay! Where are you?”
He ran to the wall of her room again. “I’m here! I thought—”
“They won’t stop moving. Linda and Patrick especially, they’re so restless! I taped their hands and feet, even tied them to the table, but they won’t stop moving.”
Cam grimaced, trying to calm the storm inside his head. It was too easy to picture her inside. Ruth was trapped. Lunatics and corpses blocked the way to the only door… and yet she had to stay.
“What can I do?” he called.
“Get me out!”
“I — We can’t do that.”
Her voice cracked. “Get me out, Cam! I know how to do it. I’m already decontaminating this section of the lab. Then you guys cut open the wall.”
The wall? he thought. This hut was wood like all the rest, but they’d lined the inside of the building with bricks and aluminum sheeting, reinforcing it like no other. Cam supposed they could chop out a hole with saws and pry bars, but why?
“You have to stay,” he said.
“Please, Cam!”
“Aren’t you working in there?”
Ruth only banged on the wall as if echoing the spasms in the other room. Whether she’d done it consciously or not, the sound filled Cam with alarm.
“We can’t build you another lab!” he yelled.
The paddle wheels in the creek were a triumph of engineering. They’d hired two guys out of Morristown to install a series of wheels and gears in the strongest part of the current, trading in corn futures for a five-kilowatt generator to transform that energy into electricity. Then, after those men left, Cam, Eric, and some others buried most of the power lines to disguise the real focal point of their grid.
Allison and the mayors of Freedom and New Jackson had managed to equip Ruth with an atomic force microscope and basic machining gear. The military had informants everywhere, but Allison trusted her underground.
Cam switched off his flashlight. “It’s only been an hour and a half,” he said. “You can fix this.”
“I can’t.”
“If you leave your equipment—”
“Listen to me! I’ve done what I can here. This AFM is old, Cam. I need better equipment if I’m really going to be able to understand this nanotech, much less take it apart.”
He shut his eyes in the dark. It was the best we could find, he thought, and you’ll never know how much food Allison gave up just to buy that gear.
“It doesn’t make sense to wait until the helicopters show up,” she said. “I don’t think you realize how long it’ll take me to decontaminate or to open the wall! We need to be ready when they show up.”
“I don’t think we can count on them, Ruth.”
She paused. Then she got loud again. “You said Grand Lake is sending a chopper!”
“I said I asked for one.”
“I can’t… I…”
There was another noise from her side of the wall that sounded like the infected people, aimless and insane. Was she pacing? “You can retool the vaccine,” he said.
“With what!? Goddammit, with what!? Are you listening to me? Most of my work here has been theoretical, Cam! This equipment is junk!”
He wanted to shout back at her, but the fire went out of him. For the second time that night, he knew what Ruth intended to say next, although he shied away from it, hoping he would hear something else. He had left so many people behind in other fights.
“What about our friends in there?” he asked.
“My advice is to run for it. We might have some chance at staying ahead of this thing if we go now. Right now. We need to get away from Morristown.”
It was exactly what he’d been thinking, and he hated them both for it. “Not everyone will go,” he said. “They’ll never go, Ruth. You know they won’t. What about Susan or Jen? Their husbands are in there.”
“There’s no other way,” she said.
8
Ruth scratched at the wall again. “Please!” she
yelled, begging now. Her claustrophobia was alive in her chest, twisting and lashing like the monsters in the other room. More than anything, she wanted out.
She wanted to be with him.
“Cam!?” she yelled inside the hot shell of her helmet. Her containment suit was damp with sweat. She was roasting in it. Each breath was an effort and her faceplate had fogged along one edge, creating a blind spot to her right. The lab was a neat white cube and well-lit with four bulbs, but Ruth kept turning her head, thinking she’d seen the shadow of someone who wasn’t there.
Her heart jumped each time Patrick lurched against the floor, setting off moans and shuffling from Linda, Michael, and Andrew, too, if he was still alive. Patrick had grown increasingly agitated. Ruth could only imagine the tangled mess of the living and the dead in the next room as Pat dragged himself through his friends. What if she hadn’t tied him well enough?
She set her gloves against the plastic sheeting on the wall. How thick was the cabin’s exterior? Eight inches? Ruth could nearly feel every layer of wood, brick, aluminum, and wood again, but there was a thinner and more vital barrier between herself and Cam — the plastic itself. Her lab was like a tent inside the white room, and she wondered how long the plastic sheeting would hold if Patrick or Michael burst in. Not long.
“We don’t have much time!” she shouted. “Cam!?”
“I’ll ask Greg,” he said at last.
“Get me out!”
“I’ll ask, Ruth.”
She could barely hear him, panting inside the muggy air of her helmet. Normally she would have been moving slowly, trying not to overheat, with the knowledge that she could always take the suit off if necessary. Instead, she’d run a marathon. Worse, this work space was filthy with nanotech. Her clean lab had been breached.
The plastic tent in the room consisted of two unequal compartments. The first section was secured to three of the room’s four walls, a six-by-six foot area jammed with her small desk, her laptop, the short, stumpy pylons of her microscopes, and other electronics. The second pocket was much smaller, a closet-sized airlock that stood just inside the door to the room. It served as a decon/dressing space, complete with an ordinary vacuum cleaner and storage bags for the blue hospital scrubs she typically wore in the lab. There was also a rack for her containment suit, which was almost impossible for one person to put on alone.
In her hurry to get outside wearing the suit, Ruth must have pulled open one of the seals between the decon chamber and the main tent. The lab was equipped with an emergency kit to resecure the plastic — a low-tech assortment of tape, a box knife, two rolls of plastic sheeting, extension cords, and a soldering gun — but she was uncertain what she could have done about the tear even if she’d seen it before she reentered the tent. There was little chance she could have sterilized her suit in the first place. The vacuum cleaner was only intended to remove dust, lint, and hair from her clothing before she went inside.
They’d installed other emergency measures: a makeshift air exchange system, and powerful UV lamps that should at least hinder an out-of-control nano if not burn it completely. Ruth believed she could reseal the lab from within, then decontaminate it and her suit, but then what? Making a break for the front door wouldn’t do her any good. Without the suit, she wouldn’t get two steps into the next room, and, wearing it, she would only contaminate herself again with no way left to remove the protective skin before she ran out of air. She needed help. She couldn’t cut through the exterior wall herself…
What if they said no?
Her sense of déjà vu took her back to the International Space Station. The Leadville government had refused to bring her back to Earth because she was an asset they couldn’t replace once she was gone, no matter that she swore there was nothing else she could do in orbit. Now she faced the same dilemma. The terrified people in Jefferson might insist on keeping her in her lab, which was why she’d asked Cam to come alone. Not so long ago, the two of them had been very close, although she could only guess how his grief had changed him.
He sounded as if he’d been about to suggest she had to stay if only to take care of the infected people. No one else could approach them.
But I can give someone else my suit if I’m outside, she thought.
Maybe a better person would have volunteered to tend to their friends. Unfortunately, in her own way Ruth had become as damaged as any survivor, not only because of the bloodshed she’d witnessed but also because of her long months spent in solitude, second-guessing everything she’d done.
Her equipment was not as bad as she’d told Cam. None of the things she’d said were lies, just exaggerations to make her point. The atomic force microscope was an IBM Centipede exactly like the one she’d used in Grand Lake. Instead of the traditional, single probe, it had a tip array of a hundred points working in parallel. Once she’d secured a plague nano to her test surface, Ruth had been able to map its general exterior in less than seventeen minutes, after which she’d begun to probe deeper into the machine, which was covered with wrinkles and furrows, ironically, much like the human brain.
There was no question that she could do better in a real lab with assistants and more computing power — but she could have stayed. She was afraid to remain here alone. She was too full of bad energy, which only compounded her guilt.
These people had put their faith in her. They’d worked so hard, from constructing this lab to selling corn futures to buy the small Ingersoll Rand air compressor they’d modified to recharge her suit’s tanks after those rare times she wore it instead of her hospital scrubs. They’d even hauled a washer/ dryer unit to the village and installed it in their shower building solely for the use of her scrubs. Everyone else did their laundry in the creek, even the new mothers. All of their precautions, every ounce of determination and grit… Would it be enough?
What if she was the weak link?
That’s not true, she thought, arguing with herself. It’s not! If nothing else, we need to get moving before more sick people stumble into town. They want to believe it can’t happen, but it will.
Ruth picked up the walkie-talkie. She’d turned it down to hear Cam through the wall, because it was still rattling with other voices. She interrupted them, upping its volume as she hit the SEND button. “This is Goldman.” She hadn’t planned to speak formally, but the old habit came back easily and she used it like a weapon, covering her remorse with a tone full of steel. “I’m coming out.”
“Wait!” Greg said. “Ruth, wait.”
“I want to dictate my findings so far.”
“What is she talking about?” one woman asked, as another female voice said, “Let me find some paper! Ruth? This is Bobbi. Let me find some paper first.”
“You have to stay inside,” Greg said. “No one else can do this for you.”
“He’s right,” Cam said.
“I’m coming out!” Ruth said, but this time she heard less conviction in her own voice. Most of her attention was still on the words she couldn’t say to Cam.
I’m sorry, she thought. I miss Allison, too.
In the next room, Patrick convulsed again, rustling and banging. Ruth wondered if he was dying. Was she honor-bound to go see? What if she could stop him from choking or if he was bleeding again? “I’ve already done most of what I can with this equipment,” she said. “Please believe me. If there was more—”
A different man cut in. “What about Linda and Michael?”
“Someone else can have my suit if they want to go back inside. You should fill the air tanks again, and meanwhile—”
“Ruth, that’s a huge waste of time,” Greg said.
“Meanwhile, I can run more analysis on my laptop! That’s exactly what you want me to do, and it’s not safe in here!”
The other man protested. “Linda would never—”
“I’ll bring my computer and the AFM, but you need to get me out.”
It was Cam who spoke against her next. “You said the lab’s contaminate
d,” he said, warning the others.
Oh, Cam, she thought. I need to be able to count on you.
“What does that mean?” someone asked, and Greg said, “Ruth, the nanotech’s loose in there, too?”
“You’re going to need awhile to get some tools together anyway. I’ll sterilize things in here, and while I’m doing that I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.”
“There’s no way to know if you’re clean,” Cam said.
“There is.”
“Ruth, can’t it wait?” Bobbi asked. “Pay attention to what you’re doing. Tell us what you can after you’re outside.”
“No, I’ll tell you now,” she said, struggling again with her claustrophobia, but it filled her voice with emotion. “I’m going to take off my suit before you open the wall,” she said, “so there’s a good chance I won’t make it out of here without being infected myself.”
Ruth knew who’d built the mind plague. She recognized the work, even though most of it was based on the same breakthroughs of the machine plague and every other nanotech that followed. The first plague had been a gateway. Once opened, it pointed the way for everything else.
Of course, its design team hadn’t meant it as a plague at all. The people behind the archos tech, a duo named Kendra Freedman and Al Sawyer, intended their device to be a cancer cure — and they’d succeeded in two of the three major challenges to nano-scale machines. For an energy source, the archos tech used the body heat of its host. To create enough nanos to accomplish any significant chore, it contained a wildly efficient replication key, allowing a single nano to become two, which became four, which became sixteen — in seconds.
