Plague Year

by Jeff Carlson

  “Yuh yusing th’now?” Sawyer asked, blurting his sounds, and Cam said, “You’re using this now?”

  “No, we’re still in trials. It’s a mock-up. But the groundwork is solid, we’ve hit 58 percent effectiveness. There’s no question that the discrim key is functional.”

  “Fif ’y hey sno’good.” His slur remained incoherent but the smugness in his tone was unmistakable.

  “Fifty-eight is awful,” she agreed, “but if we can operate faster than archos, it might not matter if the error rate is through the roof.”

  Sawyer shifted, grunting again, and Ruth mourned his speech impediment. Was that yes or no or something else altogether? How much wasn’t he saying because it was too much effort? She looked across his misshapen profile at Cam, needing help.

  It would be right to warn him, recruit him into the conspiracy. Cam would be instrumental in continuing to control Sawyer, and they might need another pair of hands during the takeover—but there was just too much at risk. She hardly knew him, and the chance existed that he might take her confession straight to Hernandez.

  Always alert, Cam noticed her glance and seemed to interpret it as a prompt. “Maybe you can make this thing better,” he told Sawyer, “make it a hundred percent.”

  “Yah.” Sawyer bobbed his head.

  “I have proofs and schematics,” Ruth said.

  “Lemme see.” Sawyer fumbled one-handed with the computer and Ruth tried to help, equally limited, her cast blocking her way. Cam reached in and the three of them managed to set the laptop on Sawyer’s thighs.

  He scrolled through the data Vernon had assembled, sectional diagrams and test series analysis. He muttered. He beat his good hand on the bed. Cam stared at the screen as he translated Sawyer’s growl, maybe hoping to increase his own understanding of their terms and concepts: “Just the fact that we’re putting this ANN tech inside the body should improve its targeting ability. It will congregate in the same places as the archos, in the extremities and scar tissue.”

  Ruth nodded with all the caution of someone in a minefield. “Sure.” She didn’t want to argue. What if he shut up for a week just to punish them? But human beings were not empty containers. A living organism was many times more complex than any equivalent area outdoors, tightly packed with miles of veins and tissue. The blood system might bring most vaccine nanos into proximity with most archos nanos, but every stray archos tucked away here and there would be free to replicate...

  Sawyer was ahead of her. “The problem is the ones we miss,” he said, through Cam, “and this discrim key looks like good work. You could probably keep everyone you’ve got sweating over it for another year before you pushed that percentage up. So we add a new component.”

  “More bulk will slow us down.” The criticism was out before she could catch it, even though she’d just reminded herself not to antagonize him.

  But Sawyer seemed to enjoy the challenge. He made a throaty bullfrog laugh and said, “Iffah wurks awurks.”

  Cam shook his head. “Sorry, what?”

  “Iffit,” Sawyer repeated, loud with anger, and Ruth said, “If it works, it works. Absolutely.”

  The archos nano generated marginal amounts of waste heat, a fraction of a calorie, when it first awoke inside a host body and then seventy-one times more during replication. By modifying the vaccine nano to detect this signature pulse as a backup to the discrimination key, Sawyer thought they could ensure that it located every archos that hadn’t been destroyed while still inactive. The person whose body was this battlefield might experience some pain and a long-term accumulation of injury, but the best way to improve the vaccine nano would be to have a working prototype that could be tested and refined.

  It was chancy, innovative. And it would be quick. Sawyer insisted they’d need only a bit of integral coding. There would be no new design work. He could craft a thermo-sensor from a single port of the heat engine, and his team had used EUVL fabrication gear—extreme ultraviolet laser—with machining capacities well beyond the MAFM or electron probe in Leadville.

  “But a lot of Stockton burned,” Ruth said. It was the perfect opening, assuming the FBI report targeting that city was accurate. “What if your lab got wiped out?”

  Sawyer turned stiffly, bringing the animate side of his face around to her. His pebbled lips drew back in a thin, numb smirk. Then he shook his head and carefully formed four syllables, pleased as always to correct her.

  “Sacramento,” he said. “We move’tuh Sacramento ad for’y f ’reven six’y hey streed.”

  Forty-four Eleven 68th Street.

  Ruth caught her breath, unable to hide her elation. His good eye never left her face, though, clear and aware and so very weary. She hadn’t tricked him. He had chosen to give up his secret, after first impressing her again with his skill set.

  It was not surrender but a change of strategy. He jabbered for another ten minutes, his cadence rushed, desperate to explain himself as his body failed him. Fatigue reduced his mumble to a slur and he soon became unable to follow his own thoughts. He repeated himself, slapping his hand on his leg, closing his eyes or staring at her with uneven, fading intensity.

  Sawyer had one more surprise for them.

  24

  Kendra Freedman expected to live forever—two or three hundred years, at least. Destroying cancerous cells was only the beginning. The archos nanotech had the capacity to rid the body of all disease and pollutants. The potential existed to overcome age itself, scouring away plaques and fatty deposits, rebuilding bones depleted by osteoporosis, replenishing the tissues of the heart, liver, stomach.

  Their parents’ generation might be the last to die.

  Given two hundred years of good health in which to continue their work—and to allow other medical technologies to advance—they could become true immortals.

  Four years before the plague, Al Sawyer jumped at the chance to work with Freedman. It wasn’t that he bought into her immortality rap. The field was full of enthusiastic kooks proposing everything from heads-up computers mounted inside the optic nerve to cold fusion in a Coke bottle. He joined Freedman because she was independent and because she offered him all the latitude he wanted and because she had money.

  Nearly two decades of sky-high promises followed by more realistic, incremental advances in nanotech had dried up venture capital funding as investors grew disillusioned, but Freedman had a sugar daddy, a rich man who didn’t want to take it with him.

  She offered Sawyer a six-figure salary and at least rented time on any equipment he wanted. It was a sweet deal, maybe too sweet for a freshly minted Ph.D., and Sawyer soon found out why. His contract was strict on intellectual rights. He would own anything he designed, but Freedman would always have free license—and in the meantime he was forbidden from publishing. Sawyer didn’t care. If he’d wanted to be famous he would have learned to play the guitar.

  Freedman was a genius engineer and didn’t need help building her device. She hired Sawyer to teach her baby to multiply. His thesis had been on replication algorithms, like those of so many of his contemporaries. Flawless self-assembly was the last great hurdle in nanotech, and there were hundreds of hotshots around the world filing for patents on every marginal improvement and new theory. Soon somebody would take that breakthrough step and leave everyone else buying the rights, shaking their heads for the rest of their lives and mumbling about how close they’d been. He didn’t want to be one of the losers.

  A black woman in a white man’s world, Kendra Freedman actually had a few more chips on her shoulder than Sawyer did himself. It was a starting point, something in common, and fostered an us-against-them attitude that was its own motivation. She was already working sixty-hour weeks before he came along, and an unspoken competition kept them both in the lab for seventy or eighty or more as they pushed on through nights and weekends. The man-woman thing played little part in their relationship. They were both too tired and anyway Freedman was five-foot-two and 170 poun
ds, shaped like a pear. That was surely some part of her drive to create body-adjusting nanos.

  At the time they were located on the outskirts of Stockton, because she had family nearby and because she was saving serious cash on her lease. Freedman had seen too many competitors burn through their funding and suddenly end up on the auction block.

  Everything changed when Sawyer ran his first successful computer simulation, three short years after signing on. Her backer was becoming impatient—the man was sixty-two— and while Freedman had continually improved the components of her device, not enough progress had been made on its programming, in part because they had a limited number of prototypes available for trials. She pulled everyone from their specialties to support Sawyer’s work, including herself.

  His script was initially error-prone but always quick. It was also the forward leap that Freedman needed to renew her backer’s interest. He brought in old friends, new funding, and Freedman blew tens of millions upgrading her computers and fabrication gear. Yet even as this equipment was delivered, her backer insisted on uprooting them. His new partnership had secured superior lab space in Sacramento, not far from the university, as well as a loose affiliation with the school that would allow Freedman to take advantage of computer science grad students. Moving her into a major city would also make it easier to bring other potential investors on walk-throughs.

  The new lab included a new isolation system, a hermetic chamber large enough to encompass their working lab. Sawyer’s replication script had a “start” but no “stop,” and in fact they hoped not to encumber his program with an end command. Ideally a well-integrated archos would devour all cancerous cells, and only cancerous cells, and therefore quit replicating when the diseased tissue was gone. For the moment, however, their half-finished nano appeared able to multiply endlessly, which was both marvelous and frightening.

  Freedman was prudent. She’d built the hypobaric fuse into the heart of her device early on, and as a safeguard it was foolproof. Test series would be run inside atmosphere hoods inside the larger chamber, for double insurance. It was unlikely that archos could escape the hoods, but the pressure within the hermetic chamber was maintained below self-destruct and the only way in and out was through an air lock.

  She chose two-thirds of a standard atmosphere as her trigger because it was a significant drop yet still tolerable for test animals and people. For simplicity she debated rounding down from 66.6 percent to 65, but her frugal habits led her to settle on 70 percent instead, since it would take slightly less time to cycle the air lock to that level. Every month they’d save themselves a few hours, and save on her electric bill.

  There were larger dangers, so-called acts of God— earthquake, fire, flood—but they set their atmosphere hoods to purge at the first hint of any threat to containment.

  It was the head of their software team who brought archos into the world, a man named Andrew Dutchess.

  At fifty, Dutchess was the oldest member of their group, a onetime refugee from the tech stock collapse of the late 1990s. He had been chief operating officer of a major corporate branch advancing new methods of screening for prostate cancer. He had been a paper millionaire and rich in family as well, married and the father of a boy and a girl.

  The recession and his company’s failure could not be blamed entirely for his divorce—like all of them he worked too many hours—just as no one else could be held responsible years later for his decision to steal archos. But Dutchess had never experienced Sawyer’s success. Dutchess had been under increased strain as Freedman pushed him to meet expectations.

  Too late, ravenous and cold on the desolate rock island above Bear Summit, Sawyer decided that Dutchess probably didn’t really do it for the money.

  Dutchess wedged a desk chair between the outer doors of the air lock, and the inner doors could not be opened until the lock equalized. Freedman and Sawyer were still inside. There was no mistaking what Dutchess had done but neither of them understood at first, rapping on the three-inch glass and shouting.

  They would never muscle their way out. The pressure differential produced a force of five tons on the doors. Given the right codes, the chamber’s pumps would increase the air density inside to match the world outside, allowing them to escape—but Dutchess had disabled the override by smashing its computer chip. The phone line was missing altogether. A cut wire might have been spliced, so he’d removed it entirely.

  He glanced back at them often as he fed discs into the many computers outside the chamber, not only downloading files but then wiping the hard drives. Meanwhile Freedman counted sample cases. Several were missing, along with most of their software and a few items that didn’t make sense, like Sawyer’s personal PDA. It looked like Dutchess had panicked— the hermetic chamber was not huge, and he would have been only a few yards from them as he filled his pockets—and apparently he’d grabbed whatever was nearest before slipping out through the air lock.

  It was Friday evening. Dutchess had made his move at the best possible time. No one else was expected in the lab until Monday, and it wasn’t as if either Freedman or Sawyer had dates who would realize they’d never left work. Dutchess had planned for a head start of more than fifty hours—but it was only Sunday afternoon when the power failed.

  Emergency batteries and then backup generators kept the lights on and the chamber secure. Twice more the public grid came up again, and failed again, and night fell before the lab’s independent system depleted its fuel reserves.

  Sawyer and Freedman had been digging at the doors’ rubber seals all that time, hands cramped around metal brackets torn from the mice cages—and without the constant efforts of its pumps, the chamber had gradually lost its negative pressure.

  They pried the doors open just after 3:00 a.m. Monday morning and emerged into chaos.

  There wasn’t—couldn’t be—a person alive who knew exactly what had happened. During their wait inside the lab, Freedman theorized that Dutchess must be on a plane to Europe or Asia, but archos was loose in the heart of the Bay Area even as she and Sawyer argued or worked at the air lock doors or took turns urinating shamefaced in the corner.

  Maybe Dutchess sold the nanotech to someone who then opened a sample wafer despite his warnings, verifying possession. More likely it was something as ordinary and stupid as a car crash, Dutchess nervous and speeding, the wafers fractured in the collision. Possibly he ran across a street without looking.

  The first reported infections were in Emeryville and Berkeley, and there was never any chance of containing it.

  Kendra Freedman stayed to alert the authorities. Sawyer last saw her driving west, deeper into the city, through an easy March rain and insane traffic. He went east.

  If she reached the capital buildings or even a police station, no record survived. The machine plague hadn’t yet reached Sacramento but panic was its own disease, ravaging the city. Her effort was wasted.

  Sawyer kept enough of his wits about him to realize that Interstates 80 and 50, the main routes up to Lake Tahoe, were not a good bet. People still hadn’t made the connection between elevation and safety, but thousands were fleeing in all directions and the streets were a mess—and he knew that 80 could be a bottleneck even in normal conditions.

  Andrew Dutchess had been a sometime skier, taking his kids to the mountains when he had them for the weekend. Back at work he’d complained about the drive every time.

  Sawyer went south, lucking past a National Guard roadblock before it was complete, then eventually turned east again on Highway 14 after inching past several wrecks and jams. This small highway was uncrowded compared to the Interstate and he made better time.

  Above 6,500 feet the rain was falling as snow.

  More than once he nearly told Cam or Erin or even Manny the truth, to better the odds that his knowledge would survive, but the risk to himself was too great. In any case, Sawyer had always known that the majority of the archos schematics and prototypes were forever lost
.

  25

  Cam found Ruth waiting for him outside the cabin. She’d left twenty long minutes ago—the time it took to clean Sawyer and get him settled down again—but apparently she also had questions she didn’t want Sawyer to hear. She sat sideways on the lowest of the three front steps, using the highest as a desk for her laptop, and when she looked up her expression was clear in the blue shine of its screen.

  Her excitement calmed him. It was answer enough to most of the things he wanted to ask.

  Sergeant Gilbride stood behind Ruth, but the other soldier must have run over to their camp with the news. The big plane radiated light now, white and red beacons on its high tail and wings, the illuminated square of its rear door busy with people. Flashlights bobbed among the shapes of their tents, too, as if stirred by the wind that had risen over this plateau.

  Cam hesitated in the doorway, letting the cold shove past him into the cabin, afraid to step on her equipment.

  Ruth said, “How is he? Sleeping again?”

  “I hope so.” As Cam watched, four silhouettes carried a box up into the plane. He didn’t think it was any later than eleven. “You can’t take off in the dark, can you?”

  “Probably.” Her eyes and smile were large, high-spirited. “But I’m sure they wouldn’t chance it.”

  “We won’t go until it’s light,” Gilbride informed them, with the same assurance as Major Hernandez. “We’re gonna need sat photos to figure out where we can land.”

  Ruth pushed her laptop aside, clearing the top step, then stood as Cam descended, her face eclipsed in shadow except for one cheek and the springy curls of her bangs. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

  He thought he felt her body heat on a fortunate brush of wind. He thought of Erin. Her scent was marvelous, subtle, female. He looked away at the plane and said, “Is this vaccine thing really going to work?”