The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  Also, our articles stay online.

  Even without the benefit of morning coffee, Ben found this left a taste in his mouth that he wouldn’t have recommended to anyone. Over the years working for the BBC he’d been trained to view the company as at best competition and at worst the enemy intent on putting them all out of work, and despite having successfully lost his job with Auntie, the feeling hadn’t entirely evaporated.

  Probably, Ben thought, because they were a bunch of unscrupulous, amoral shitbags who sanctioned smear campaigns and harassed the parents of recently-dead children and had poured a frightening amount of money into legislation which was so flagrantly awful that it made him wince to think about.

  He considered what Sherazi would say about a contract like this.

  He also noticed there was an attachment.

  Staff_writer_contract.pdf

  Nothing dodgy about that, Ben thought, with some sarcasm. Nothing dodgy at all about you sending me the contract through with first contact like you expect it to be snapped up immediately. Arrogant shits.

  He read over the contract blearily. It read like a list of hotel features, or an advertisement for a cruise. We’ve got all this neat stuff.

  Then, some way down towards the bottom of the contract, in the smaller text, he spotted a few familiar terms.

  KBV, Dr Natalya Yagoda, HPA Colindale, virology,

  He skipped back to the beginning of the sentence.

  Will therefore agree not to file with the Group or with any other publishing group, print or online, any story pertaining to or mentioning in any way the following subjects

  “Of course,” Ben said. He wondered how many other people got polite offers like this.

  After a moment of regarding the email with something like disbelief and something like cynicism, he forwarded the whole thing to Dr Bill, and added one sole comment to the bottom:

  A carrot, apparently.

  In a break from funny/awful lab stories and griping about the pressures the average molecule-jockey is subjected to, some interdisciplinary drama: I have a friend (amazing but true) who writes for The Popular Press, with all that this entails (fuzzy on proper information like mere names of bases and infinitely paranoid about being sued) and who has recently written about KBV. I know, that narrows it down to a field of ‘everyone’. That’s the idea.

  Now despite this friend having a phenomenal amount of his work subsequently removed by his publishers, he’s somehow caught the attention of a very well-known (if not very well-regarded) news corporation, who’ve decided, on the basis of the one article he’s managed to keep on the internet for more than ten minutes, to offer him a very sexy-looking staff writer contract with all the bells and whistles and the kind of regular wage mere world-and-life-saving research scientists can only masturbate to.

  Apart from having a revelation as to why all successful journalists are smug complacent shits (who can buy houses in Muswell Hill) this offer seems fishily OTT to me. People have to labour for years in the salt mines of borderline-making-shit-up for newspapers before they get that kind of recognition and to be brutally honest, I’ve read his writing and it’s not electrifying. It’s not like he has exclusive sources — everyone the guy has spoken to has tried repeatedly to talk to other people first.

  Of course I wouldn’t be blogging about hunches without strong evidence, and I think the fact that the contract they offered him contained a strident clause about not talking about KBV in any medium kind of seals the idea that maybe this shit isn’t kosher.

  When placed alongside the recent assault on and attempted bribery of Dr Natalya Yagoda (working on: oh look, KBV) it becomes even more fishy.

  But I’m aware two data points is not enough for a conclusive graph, so help me out, regular readers and passing microbial specialists:

  Have you had any similar experiences with disappearing papers, inducements to shut up, or outright threats to your career or self, relating to KBV? Has any applicable work gone missing in a way more conclusive than usual academic incompetence?

  Email the blog account (virusproddersanonymous

  @gmail.com) and let me know so I can turn this hunch into a definite bout of paranoia and beat my reporter friend at his own game.

  Ben re-read Tasneen’s brief message:

  Tasneen Ali: Everything is fucked, don’t ask, please lie to S and say I’m ill or something. Found this while avoiding more domestic explosions, think this guy is talking about you? http://link.ly/vibl/3

  He made a face at his laptop.

  Ben M: Definitely talking about me. Thanks. Will tell Sherazi you have tuberculosis.

  Daniel’s voice was so clearly his in the blog posts — or some of them, given that it was a group blog — that Ben was surprised no one from UCLH had found it and recognised it yet. Maybe they had and were conspiring not to tell management on account of Daniel’s sunny disposition and likeable temperament meaning they didn’t want him fired.

  Ben nearly laughed at himself.

  To: Khoo, Daniel

  From: Ben M

  Subj: literary skills

  Didn’t realise you had a blog.

  He checked the time, and realised that he was either going to have to run at some point on his route to college, or face Sherazi raising her eyebrows at him for arriving late when he’d been planning on getting in early for a quick spot of advice-seeking.

  If he’d owned cleats, he would have strapped them on.

  Safely static on the tube heading west, Ben checked his emails again.

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  To: Ben M

  Subj: re: literary skills

  It is almost entirely reserved for bitching about Lordes. I assume you found my campaign to undermine your status as Top KBV Journalist and replace myself with that coveted title? Also that post has been up for days; some journalist you are.

  By luck, or by blocked roads, Ben made it into the corridor before Sherazi made it into the classroom, and lurked there like a trend-chasing ghost until she came into view, laptop tucked into her armpit and coffee in hand.

  “Am I the pope now?” Sherazi asked, juggling a newspaper in her other hand. “Are you here to petition me for clemency or are you going into the classroom?”

  “On behalf of Tasneen,” Ben said with an attempt at a smile.

  “Mm,” Sherazi tried to look at her watch without dislodging anything else. “Two minutes. Where is your study partner, Benjamin?”

  “She’s…er, she’s ill. She’s got…a chest thing,” Ben offered.

  “You’re an awful liar. You’re supposed to be nagging the wretch into producing some kind of progress report on her project,” Sherazi gave him a smile that contained no teeth and a lot of menace. “Which, incidentally, you were supposed to do, and which I let you off because I get to see your progress in the liberal press. Usually, I might add, without any kind of warning.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Now did you just want to stick your neck out for your dearly delayed classmate or was there something you wanted to ask me?” Sherazi added.

  “Er, yes,” Ben shrivelled up inside himself, and took the coward’s way out. “Did you get my email?” He tried to lean back against the bare concrete slab wall, but it was further back than he anticipated, and he only rocked on the spot before righting himself, like an anxious Weeble.

  “Oh yes.” Sherazi regarded him patiently. “I did get your email with your attachment of confidential information from a large company with a lot of very blood thirsty and very capable lawyers.”

  “Uh,” said Ben.

  “Were you expecting advice?”

  “Hoping for?” Ben said weakly. “I don’t…I mean, it sounds dodgy. I just…would also like to not have to go further into debt to pay for the rest for this course?”

  “I’m not going to give you any advice about it,” Sherazi said, jamming the newspaper next to her laptop with some difficulty. “You’ve got a functioning brain, some of the time, and your own bloo
dy moral compass to consult. But I will say,” she pointed her coffee cup at him, “it doesn’t sound ‘dodgy’, it sounds like the first step in an investigation and if I weren’t taking the money I’d want to know what interest they had in keeping me quiet. Who are their advertisers that are likely to be affected? Who’s put money into them recently who might want a favour now? Who has the clout and the desire?”

  Ben filed this away for future use but the only thing he said was, with a faint smile, “So I’m not taking the money?”

  Sherazi waved her hand at him with a scowl. “Oh you’d already decided that, look at you. Virtuous little child—”

  “I’m nearly thirty—”

  “Good grief, where I come from men can grow beards by the time they’re sixteen, you look like a schoolgirl.”

  “I’m not taking the money,” Ben agreed, opening the classroom door for her.

  “Always remember,” Sherazi advised, with the air of someone who doesn’t care how her advice is likely to be taken, “you don’t necessarily have to pay back loans, but signing yourself up for silence isn’t going to give you a lot of opportunities as a professional blabbermouth.”

  Ben acknowledged, after he’d nearly been run over by a cyclist who called him a fucking stupid prick and invited his mother to do something anatomically impossible, that it hadn’t really been prudent to check his emails while he was walking down the side of a main road, and that absent-mindedly turning off at the pedestrian crossing without looking up to see if cyclists understood that rules of the road also applied to them had been a misstep.

  The emails themselves, however, probably warranted it.

  He stepped into the pub about five minutes walk from the tube station, intending to get out of everyone’s way for a second, and found himself sitting down with a pint of something unfamiliar while the TV above the bar talked about sputum testing in a needlessly breathless way. Ben assumed this was where his tutors came to undo their frustrations over lunch, but despite craning his neck to see into all of the glass-topped booths, he was spared the sight of any of them.

  Ben reopened the email that had distracted him into the path of an angry cyclist:

  To: Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: FWD: FWD: please help.

  [Got this via virusproddersanonymous. Checked the sender’s email server and it seems legit, a work address for someone at a gas company operating out of Tashkent]

  To: Khoo, Daniel

  From: All Your Base Are Dangerous to Us

  Subj: FWD: please help---

  To: All Your Base Are Dangerous to Us

  From: XXXX.XXX@XXX.uz

  Subj: please help

  We Vulnerability in Google Translate to me, and I apologize for the quality of English. You koneboget the virus on the Internet, and I always look for suspicious circumstances, I read your blog.

  I see a lot of people, but they do not want to listen to I. Most of them did not even answer. And ignored by the English-language newspaper, and I tried to speak with my newspapers, and the police came to me. They were polite, but they said these things, and asked not to tarnish the image of Uzbekistan. I think that we are not tarnished, but made better possible.

  Many friends in the country, the virus has killed more than usual. A friends with the symptoms we all thought to be infected with the United Kingdom in the first time, she simply returned. But did come home not from UK with the same symptoms, and a few other friends. Then, we will, maybe we Badai-Turung can be a source of celebration of our meeting, the disease from there. I do not know it, but you know what I thought. It is not true.

  Ben tried to fit this into his mental timeline of KBV in the UK as he translated it: the email’s author had seen an unusually high number of his friends die from the illness, even for Uzbekistan; the email’s author thought the Badai-Turung reunion had been the source, after first dismissing the possibility a friend had been infected after their return from the UK. Admittedly, he wouldn’t have figured that out had the Badai-Turung reunion not been mentioned in every third article.

  If the friend this email mentioned, if it wasn’t a hoax, was Shahzoda Shahzoda Niyazov…

  I look back four years before, when my friends began to die, now, because we know what it is, how long it takes.

  We were still at the University. My class is a small fee to participate in the clinical. I as a patients has been canceled because of lung infection for a long time. Look at my medical class take trial. Some of them later konboget the development of the disease and they died. Some of them can not develop it. Their time: they in trial, the demo company paid for training for those who want to take it abroad, to travel. I can not, there are medical and in trial, no money for me.

  The company, Ben thought, wasn’t exactly being ungenerous. Remittances for being in a medical trial was one thing. Being paid to travel afterward seemed unusual. Four years before the first of his friends began to die, a period which took into account the asymptomatic period and the time it took the disease to progress from symptoms to death, they’d been in a trial, and then sent abroad?

  Not everyone in my class who go to trial have a virus koneboget. But anyone who has died from it in those days it from my class.

  Twelve people can not accidental.

  Something cold spread across the back of Ben’s neck and the hairs on his arms stood up. He slowly and determinedly drank half of his pint, and slowly and determinedly lay the glass back down on a beer mat before allowing his mind to be overrun with questions:

  Is this for real? Is this a weird practical joke? Why hasn’t anyone heard about this before? Who is this guy?

  To: Khoo, Daniel

  From: Ben M

  Subj: re: FWD: FWD: please help

  Is this a real thing, was this guy actually at university there? Was there a trial? Did he say who ran it? Who is he?

  He finished the other half of his pint and considered buying another one. Above the bar the TV had moved onto the local news: Ben caught the words new isolation wards as they scrolled across the bottom of the screen and disappeared. He considered the words conspiracy nut repeatedly.

  To: Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: re: re: FWD: FWD: please help

  I demand a Pulitzer for this. Yes, he’s a real person, with a real traceable background, who was really at the University of Tashkent when he says he was, and as far as I can work out from bad translations of things from Uzbek via Russian (why?), he was in a maths class with six of the first named victims of KBV: I looked up the rest of the class and four more of them are dead, although it doesn’t say what of or if it does Google Translate doesn’t want any of it. And then there’s two completely unaccounted for.

  I don’t know about the trial, I can’t find anything about it online, but he says it was run by XXXXXXX on behalf of a pharmaceutical company and he doesn’t know the name of the pharmaceutical company.

  Howzat? I’m literally a better journalist than you are.

  Ben stared at his phone for a bit longer, and the barmaid, who didn’t seem to have a lot to tax her at this point, turned the TV volume up.

  “—cold snap, high winds from the North East, blowing in right down from the Arctic and from just up there towards Finland and Russia, coming down across to us by the end of the week—”

  From: Ben M

  To: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: re: re: re: FWD: FWD: please help

  You’re a much, much better journalist than me and I owe you a drink.

  Ben sat hunched up in the leather-seated booth, staring down at his phone on the table top, and began slowly to tap his teeth with his thumbnail. His instinct was to ask Sherazi what the hell he should do, but it occurred to him that twice in one week might lead to her skinning him alive for being indecisive.

  It then occurred to him that he knew at least one person who might have a slightly better idea of what happene
d in post-Soviet states than he did, and would be interested to hear.

  He forwarded the first email to Natalya and Dr Bill, and slumped back against the back of the booth, feeling as if he’d run a long way in a very short space of time, and not sure how to make it stop.

  He didn’t get a reply until he got home, but when he did, it seemed that the anonymised Uzbek graduate source was, for the time being, not a priority.

  Ben limped up the stairs to his flat, having hit his foot in the closing doors of a Circle line train and felt it grow steadily more painful over the course of the journey home. He limped slightly more dramatically through to the bathroom and sat on the toilet to take off his shoe.

  His foot was purple, but not especially swollen, and as far as Ben understood that meant he could probably just take some ibuprofen and forget about it. He did the former, and did his best to do the latter while making a sandwich. Minnie, very considerately, stayed out from under his feet in favour of sitting on his shoulder and administering a deafening purr to his ear.

  Feeling a little sorry for himself, Ben made himself sympathy tea, and propped himself up in front of what looked like an in-depth report on something to do with farming, but which, on having the volume turned up, turned out to be atmospheric shots for a story on an entire rural family in Norfolk being taken into quarantine together. With the usual voice-over mandatory “debate” about whether quarantine precautions were, in light of the non-airborne nature of the disease and low death rate so far, over-zealous.

  Ben checked his emails.

  To: Ben M

  CC: Khoo, Daniel

  From: Dr Bill Greenhill

  Subj: at your earliest convenience / pref before dinner tomorrow

  Got your email about the Tashkent guy. N’s been talking to David, Rhiannon, etc at HPA pretty much every day and scraping their data off them — she mentioned they’re not supposed to be and apparently Anil said he was working for N, not HPA, as far as he was concerned — what I gather is that she’s even more sure now that what they have can’t have evolved naturally. The fact that it triggered false-positives in three completely unrelated types of antigen should have been enough but it’s more or less certain that something kind of collision between known viruses has happened here, and I don’t know of any normal circumstances that lead to ones like these having that ability. If it had been different types of flu, maybe that would be more plausible.