The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  In theory he could probably have stayed inside, where the warmth was, but the habit was already in place.

  In the wind, which nearly pushed him into one of the floor-to-ceiling windows the college had clad itself in, Ben caught a sudden inspiration. He might not know how to get hold of this star virologist, but he knew someone who might.

  He folded himself up on one of the concrete benches, and took out his phone again.

  To: "Khoo, Daniel"

  From: "Ben M"

  Subj: Just on the off chance

  You don’t happen to have a contact number or an email address or something for Natalya Yagoda at HPA Colindale, do you?

  Ben rooted around in his laptop bag in the hope of finding something that resembled a painkiller, but he only managed to find caffeine pills, antihistamines, and something he sincerely hoped wasn’t MDMA.

  A huge segment of the smokers went back into the building, arguing about something. They were all wearing overalls, and so Ben guessed they were probably one of the electronics classes. He wondered if that was more or less frustrating than journalism: they’d never covered anything that practical at his school, and he’d been missing from most of his classes anyway.

  His phone shook in his hand.

  To: "Ben M"

  From: "Khoo, Daniel"

  Subj: Re: Just on the off chance

  So you’re alive, then. I thought you’d at least have emailed to bollock me for just dumping you in a taxi.

  As for your business-like request: I don’t have any contact details for Dr Yagoda, she’s more important than mere BDV-prodding mortals like me. What I DO have is the format their email addresses are in over there in Important Research, so it shouldn’t be too hard to work out.

  “Huh,” said Ben, who hadn’t been expecting this to work.

  He wandered back inside, up two flights of stairs, and into the quiet study area, still gazing thoughtfully at the email. The quiet study area was for once actually quiet: one of the older students had fallen asleep on a stack of books about Dadaism and one of the others was texting placidly behind a book on Afrofuturism, but no one was yelling at each other.

  Ben sat down opposite the texter and dumped his bag on the table. Someone down in the lower floors of the atrium called someone a wanker very loudly.

  The sensible thing, Ben thought, recalling what had once been his job, was to work out exactly what he needed to ask her, so that she didn’t just see his email and assume he was another time-wasting idiot. Concise, to the point, already-informed, and only seeking clarification on some points: that was what people liked. That was what he had, in theory, been good at.

  Ben tapped his thumbnail on his teeth. It would probably help, he thought, if he knew what the hell he was doing.

  “I’m not emailing him again,” he said under his breath.

  The sensible thing to do, he thought, would be to reread the article until he had a good sense of what was in it before he started pestering this woman, this scientist, with questions about what wasn’t in it. That was just good sense. Ben’s head gave a belligerent throb.

  The sensible thing to do would also be to eat something substantial and lie down for three more hours.

  He opened the Guardian app again, and tried to scroll up to the top of the article.

  The page you are looking for could not be found.

  Ben frowned, and went to the author list. He scrolled down until he found the guest writers, and found Natalya Yagoda — square face, straight dark hair, vaguely East Asian-looking, ears that stuck out. Something about her reminded him of something. The only article under her name was from some time ago, titled:

  How the Triple Test Came To Be: accidents in science are as useful as they are dangerous.

  No sign whatsoever of:

  Leading scientist claims KBV ‘may not have natural origin’.

  Ben shrugged. It was probably the app.

  He pulled the Macbook out of his bag, dodged several notifications and demands for his attention, and opened up the Guardian website.

  Natalya Yagoda’s article list once again consisted of one.

  He tried looking for the page.

  The link came up, but when he clicked on it the message the article you are looking for does not exist returned.

  “Weird,” said Ben, looking at the cache for the page. It had definitely existed at some point.

  He refreshed the page.

  The previous article has been removed as there has been some legal question about its content.

  The hairs on the back of his neck disobliged him by standing up for no damn reason.

  Ben thought about this for a moment, and wrote an infinitely shorter email than he’d originally intended to.

  Dear Dr Yagoda,

  I was planning to email you with some questions regarding your recent article about gene patents and KBV when I found the article in question had more or less vanished from the internet. Are you aware that your work has been removed?

  Ben Martin

  After a second’s additional thought, he CC’d in Daniel, and sent the email.

  After no response from Dr Yagoda, and no response from Daniel, Ben dropped by the staff room and made his excuses to Kyle regarding his next no show. Kyle only said, “Go to bed, you look like death,” and went back to whatever had his attention.

  Ben crawled home.

  He made a small pile of sandwiches, lay down on the futon, pulled a blanket up to his nose, and spent the rest of the day determinedly ignoring his phone, his laptop, and his own sense of physical and mental unease, until the sun had gone and the TV started advertising things which weren’t children’s toys or Saga cruises.

  Molly: Are you still coming tonight?

  Ben M: No

  Molly: Ina was going to introduce us to Pete tho

  Ben M: I feel like shit. You’re going to have to hold the fort for us both.

  Molly: Aww babe, don’t push yourself

  Molly’s immediate sympathy just made it feel worse. Ben stared at the empty plate, and slid it under the coffee table/chair with a mounting sense of guilt.

  “The news at six o’clock,” said the TV, before Ben could mute it.

  He watched through to the end. Possible-friend-of-someone-Doug Lewis’s appearance on the parliamentary debates, talking crossly about misrepresentation and public safety, came up again, but there was no mention whatsoever about Dr Yagoda’s discovery, and nothing in the bigger stories about KBV at all.

  He supposed there wouldn’t be. People were slowly getting used to the idea that it existed, but having trouble giving a shit about it because of how slowly it came on. Until someone you knew got it, it wasn’t real.

  Minnie climbed onto the TV and helpfully obscured the weather forecast with her tail.

  Ben’s phone rang.

  He glanced at the number, and considered letting it ring off.

  He picked up the phone, and considered letting it ring off.

  He answered it, wishing that he’d just left it alone.

  “Dad?”

  “Has your sister called?”

  Ben lay back on the futon and stared at the ceiling. He catalogued all of the occasions he’d woken up in the middle of the night because the landline was howling by his head, and all of the times he’d been startled out of conversation by cut-off demands that he come by or, lately, get her out.

  He took each memory and shoved them inside a duffel bag inside his mind.

  “No.”

  There was a pause. “Right,” said his father. “Only there was a letter from the hospital requesting that we don’t make contact.”

  “I haven’t had one.”

  “Apparently she doesn’t want to talk to Melinda and me,” said his father, abruptly. There was no earthly way of knowing, Ben thought, what exactly he father thought of this, but he couldn’t help thinking well I’m not surprised.
/>   “Okay,” said Ben.

  “Melinda wants a word,” said his father, with palpable relief. There was a rustle of handsets changing hands.

  “Ben?”

  “Hi,” said Ben, closing his eyes.

  “Are you alright for money?”

  “Mm.”

  “Are you okay? You sound a bit distant.”

  “Just tired,” said Ben, as his throat tightened. “Night work. Messes with your sleep schedule.”

  After a week of no response from Dr Yagoda, Ben had accepted that he probably wasn’t going to get one. One of Kingsley’s Little Bastards had, it turned out, actually been implicated in the stabbing, although not as the actual stabber, and Kingsley’s energies were directed almost entirely towards persuading the little shit to make himself useful to the police instead of the more natural approach of keeping his mouth shut.

  The main upshot was that Ben was eating a lot more sandwiches and a lot less leftover plantains than he’d been accustomed to.

  “Someone needs to teach you to cook,” Kingsley said, passing him on the way out one morning.

  “I know how to cook,” Ben said, sandwich in hand.

  Kingsley only gave his sandwich a withering look and dragged his bike out of the door.

  “The thing about KBV, and one of the more troubling things, is that even with Dr Yagoda’s test — which we can hardly apply globally because it’s not really safe for many laboratories to have the samples you need for the test, Ebola alone is BSL-4—” said a voice from the TV.

  Ben put the sandwich in his mouth and began rooting around for the remote.

  “—so we just don’t have the first idea how many people are actually infected. That long asymptomatic window is a real cause for concern, the high level of mutation is cause of concern, the inability to sequence it is cause for concern, and personally I think it’s pretty scary that we don’t have any way right now of telling what kind of explosion of new cases we’re likely to face in the long run. What’s scarier than that is that without concrete figures, without the kind of push for a proper campaign the way we had with HIV, the public are simply not motivated to take the right prophylactic measures.”

  Ben cursed himself for not installing the universal remote app while it was still free, and with mounting suspicion reached under the cat.

  “So the public response is very much ‘why should we care about this’?” said another, more familiar voice: one of the ubiquitous posh-Scots women who presented morning news shows. “They’re saying, ‘well, you were wrong about swine flu, you were wrong about bird flu, why should we trust you to be right about KBV’?”

  “Firstly, we were not wrong about H1N1, it did develop person-to-person transmission. And secondly, as doctors,” said the first voice, “we’re required to take every potential epidemic seriously. In the case of swine flu, the question was whether flu, a highly unstable and constantly-mutating virus, was going to make the leap from animal-to-person transmission to person-to-person transmission. We were lucky, and it didn’t.”

  The voice ram-raided the conversation, moving at speed to keep any interruptions out of the audience’s ears.

  “Although I wouldn’t talk about it in the past tense, that is very much still a possibility. With KBV we know there is person-to-person transmission already.”

  Ben winced.

  “What we don’t know is how virulent it is, how many people you are likely to infect, we simply don’t have enough data because it’s still relatively new — Ebola had been known for thirty years before we started to get a real understanding of it and develop a vaccine, and that took quite a serious epidemic — and when we’re in the dark about a communicable disease that’s so far been a hundred percent fatal, it suggests to me that it would be sensible to take it very seriously indeed.”

  Minnie dug her claws into the carpet and made a sound like naaoo.

  Ben grabbed the remote.

  “Dr Greenhill, thank you,” said the interviewer, and — somewhat too late — Ben hit mute.

  He watched the silent close of the segment while putting his shoes on. Dr Greenhill was a dark-haired, barrel-chested man with a thick, tidy beard and a warm, self-effacing smile, who sat in a wheelchair the way children sat in school chairs. Ben thought he remembered him from occasional sessions haranguing politicians, and his voice was definitely familiar from the radio, but as far as he was concerned it was too early in the morning to find this familiarity comforting.

  Minnie walked under his legs, and farted.

  “You’ll be pleased to hear we have a change of direction today,” Sherazi said, addressing, for once, a full house of students. “I have to do something tedious and important involving funding, so you’re free to go and work on this assignment wherever you like — just have it in by tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” Mark squawked, sliding down in his chair.

  “Dealing with tight deadlines is something you’re going to get used to or die trying,” Sherazi said grimly. “And as a favour to you all, you don’t have to cast around for a topic. Just fall back on your research project.”

  “How is that a favour,” Ifeoma said under her breath.

  “And if you haven’t started work on your research project yet,” said Sherazi with another of her merciless, tight-lipped smiles, “tough shit.”

  She hit a key on her laptop, and the projection changed to one of a garish news website that looked like it had been designed by a toddler with too much sugar in her diet.

  “Some of you will already know this site. GADdamnitNews are as always desperate for new content, and they’re not picky about where they get it from. This is, by the way, an assignment that will potentially earn you money, if you need motivation beyond my extreme displeasure to get you writing.” Sherazi scrolled down through a collection of mind-breakingly awful headlines. “Now, this is the easy way in, but trust me: getting an article in the papers isn’t as hard as you think it is. Look on the letters page of any newspaper, call up, ask for who you want — features, science, whoever — and they put you through, and you say "I’d like to write a feature about X". Sometimes they let you! They might you ask you if you’ve written anything before, but just lie.”

  Olivia put up her hand, although her attention was still focussed very much on her phone. “Can we tell them we have a blog?”

  “If you have a good blog,” Sherazi agreed, unexpectedly, “that will do.”

  Ben wondered what on earth Olivia’s blog would be about. He’d pegged her more as the sort of person who had a Pinterest full of pictures of girls wearing floral dresses and close-ups of their knees.

  “This assignment,” Sherazi went on, tapping the table next to her laptop, “is about sensationalism and speculation. Every single piece on this site is an op ed masquerading as news: what I want you to do is take your research subject, write something appropriate for these noise merchants, something in keeping with their bombastic nonsense of a house style, and sell it to them.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” said James. “What happens if they don’t buy it, do we still get proper grades and that?”

  Sherazi shrugged. “I’ll be disappointed,” she said, “they’re not exactly a quality news outlet.”

  “You said by tomorrow,” Chantelle protested.

  “It’s eight hundred words, maximum,” Sherazi said testily. “If you can’t crank out less than a thousand words of bullshit in a whole twenty four hours when there’s not even anyone shooting at you I don’t think you want to be a journalist very much.”

  “Easy for her to say,” muttered Tasneen as they left. “How do you sensationalise pollution levels in the pacific ocean? I think I’d rather have a grenade thrown at me.”

  “Well if you ask nicely,” said Ben, “she probably has some in her office.”

  Ben M: Bearing in mind that some doctor just said KBV was made-up and then had her article pulled, what’s the most entertainingly mental explanation you can think of for that?

  In
a Metsian: Conspiracy theory. Get giant lizard people in there somehow.

  Ben M: I’ve looked at the site, they’re not that mental.

  Ina Metsian: Did you do the Bandcamp page?

  Ben M: Yeah it’s all up and running now. You just need to put your bank details in at the other end so they can pay you.

  Ina Metsian: Have you considered a shadowy government cabal?

  Ben M: Which government?

  “They bought it,” Ben told Tasneen the next day, somewhat stunned. “It’s full of typos and it’s bullshit from start to finish and they bought it.”

  “Sherazi wasn’t fucking kidding about them being desperate,” said Tasneen, who’d also managed to sell complete nonsense about Pacific pollution and was already apparently mentally spending her nominal writer’s fee. “I swear if any of them have managed not to sell to that site I will be so surprised.”

  “James,” said Ben after a moment. “I bet James hasn’t even written anything.”

  KBV: Natural agent or sinister experiment?

  Last week, respected virologist and Kazakhstani ex-pat Dr Natalya Yagoda stunned the public by publishing an article in which she claimed that the koneboget virus menace was not natural in origin, but man-made. That article was almost immediately pulled, and GADdamnNews wants to know why.

  Military Project?

  It wouldn’t be the first time military experiments with biological weapons have gone awry. At the fall of the Soviet Union, empty reactors used for culturing SMALLPOX were found, and despite the Russian government’s claims to be working solely on cures for diseases like THE PLAGUE (Yersinia pestis) and smallpox, can they really be trusted?

  After lying to WHO (the World Health Organisation) and the UN about their smallpox stocks, is it truly unlikely that Russia or other Former Soviet States might be back to their old biological warfare tricks?

  Terrorist Activity?

  Small factories working with CAMELPOX in an attempt to turn it into a human-transmissible disease were found in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein; the US Government fears the use of Anthrax bombs and weaponised Ebola so much that it once had an entire branch of the army devoted to researching biological weapons. Is it really so far-fetched to think that KBV might be the brainchild of a terrorist organisation bent on the slow destruction of Western civilisation?