The Virus

by Janelle Diller

  “Oh, honey, I know.” Her voice was low and soothing. She could have just as easily been telling me not to worry about my bad day at school. “It does seem like a lot of unnecessary extra stuff, doesn’t it?” Her eyes darted around the room behind me as she talked. “But they just told us they need the statistical information.”

  “They need fingerprints for statistics?”

  She gave a very tiny shrug of her shoulders and her eyes darted some more. She handed me a packet of information. “Don’t let the incision get wet. The sheet gives several ways to protect your arm from getting wet in the shower. The incision will be sore for the next few days. If the soreness doesn’t go away within forty-eight hours, call this number.” She pointed to the phone number at the top of the page. “You may develop a slight fever in the next twenty-four hours. Again, if it’s not gone in forty-eight hours, call the number. Don’t worry about the stitches. They’ll dissolve within the next seven days. You’ll have a tiny scar, but nothing like those old smallpox vaccine scars. It won’t hurt your modeling career.”

  We both laughed even though she’d probably given the same line a hundred times that day already.

  She read through several additional instructions and finished with one final caution: “In about .02 percent of vaccinations, the capsule doesn’t dissolve properly and festers its way out of the skin, like a splinter would. If that happens, it’s important that you call the number on the sheet immediately.”

  She sent me off with a grandmotherly pat. I half expected her to surprise me with a small bag of homemade cookies, but it didn’t happen.

  Not including the hideous wait time, from start to finish the vaccination process took about twenty minutes. Including traveling and waiting, I’d given up over twelve hours of my day. Of course, at the time, I couldn’t begin to realize just how much I’d truly given up.

  CHAPTER

  11

  EDDY HAD BEEN AGITATED ON THURSDAY. By Friday night, he was livid.

  I talked to myself the whole way home from Denver about how much of the day I should tell him. But I’m no good with secrets, especially with Eddy, so in the end, I told him—saliva sample, finger printing, and all. Maybe it was a mistake, but it was a lesser mistake than not telling him.

  “Why didn’t you just walk out of there?” He was opening a bottle of wine as he talked, but I didn’t think it was going to do much to mellow either of us. He’d already set out a basket with some sesame flatbread and a dish of his homemade garlic hummus.

  “Because if I had, I’d be writing my letter of resignation right now.”

  “Who cares?” He was nearly shouting. In fifteen years of marriage, I’d never seen him so upset with me. “Who gives a damn? So instead, you give up the last shred of privacy you could ever have. And for what? A job that’s sucking the lifeblood out of you and you want to quit anyway?”

  I felt jittery on the inside but tried not to show it. “If it hadn’t been a vaccination for this job, it’d be one for the next job. They’re gearing up for the whole country to get immunized.”

  Eddy poured a couple of glasses of wine and handed one to me. “You still think this is about a vaccination, don’t you?” He shook his head. “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.”

  I hated the subtle condescension in his voice. I wasn’t stupid. “It’s definitely about a vaccination,” I said, although I was far less sure than I sounded.

  “You just said you spent twelve hours for a procedure that by itself, didn’t take more than twenty minutes. And oh, by the way, they now have your fingerprints and DNA samples, along with every piece of personal information you have except your credit card information.” He looked at me and groaned. “You didn’t pay for the vaccine with your credit card, did you?”

  He painted such a sticky web of conspiracy that I felt guilty that I’d laid down such an information trail. I couldn’t look him in the eye.

  He sighed. “It doesn’t matter if you did. That information is the easiest information to get. It’s just tied together more neatly now.”

  “I at least used my corporate American Express, not our personal Visa.”

  He just shook his head and stared at the floor.

  “Look, it’s not like most of that information isn’t out there already. True, they don’t have my DNA, but when I was on the Social Security project I had to pass a background check that included my fingerprints. So now they have one more piece of information. Big deal.”

  “Maggie, it is a big deal. I’ve been thinking about this a lot.” He added more wine to his glass. I’d barely taken a sip from mine. “What’s the biggest showstopper your Baja Breeze has for moving to Zaan software?”

  “That the project manager has more cleavage than brain cells.”

  He smiled and took a slow sip of wine. “Okay. I’ll give you that one. So what’s their second biggest showstopper?”

  It felt like a trick question, but it didn’t matter. I only had one answer: “Data conversion.”

  “Exactly.” He scooped a little hummus onto some flatbread and took a bite. “And the problem with data conversion isn’t that the data doesn’t exist. The problem is that it exists in multiple places and has lots of variations and errors. But to start over entering all the information from scratch is way too labor intensive. So the idea is to clean up the data in all the different systems and then bring it over into the new system, right?”

  I nodded. It was easy to see where he was going with this.

  “Now let’s say you’re the US government, and you want all of your information about people in a single place. Not some of it in the IRS system, some in the FBI and CIA systems, some of it in Social Security. You want one-stop shopping. But to get there, you’re going to spend a gazillion dollars paying for government types or temps to key in all the information, complete with their own typos. And how do you hide that in a federal budget?”

  He munched a little more on the flatbread. “I can see it now: ‘Ten billion dollars for software and database technology and the clerks to type all of our citizens’ personal information into a single system that’s named, uh, Big Brother.’ Wouldn’t it be easier just to start from scratch and have you provide your most current information into the system? And along the way, you also get fingerprints and DNA samples. And the bonus is that you can still build interfaces between the new database and all the other databases so you can bring up Margaret M. Rider in the smallpox database and dive into what she paid to the IRS last year or whether she has an FBI file. One-click shopping.”

  “That last bit might be a stretch. Interfaces are tricky and expensive with dated systems.”

  “Okay. So maybe that’s a future phase. But think about it. What’s the one thing the National Security Agency can’t do now with all their information about our phone calls and emails?”

  I cringed and thought of our many conversations about what the NSA might be tracking with Eddy and his less than politically correct wanderings through the World Wide Web. “I give up. They already can do anything they want.”

  Eddy shook his head. “They can find the needle in the haystack right now. What they can’t find is the guy who left the needle.”

  “And now they can.”

  “Which may be more important than the actual needle. After all, if they’re so intent on tracking us all, do you think they’d be very worried about whether we’re really guilty of something?”

  I shook my head, weary of where this was all leading.

  “What if they just happen not to like a guy’s politics? Or religion. Or color of his skin.”

  “Or whatever website he’s created.”

  “Touché.” He touched his glass to mine.

  “The drones are already out there. In use. We know that.”

  “Exactly.” Eddy leaned onto the table and rubbed the back of his neck. “The money part wouldn’t even be much of a showstopper. If you can spend eighty million a day to fight a war in some desert, you can surely scrape together ten o
r twenty days’ worth of funds to build the ultimate database. It costs twice as much to do it this way, but it gets buried in the Homeland Security budget under the guise of protecting the nation from a smallpox epidemic that seems very real.”

  I felt slightly nauseous, but maybe that was one of the symptoms of the vaccination. “And everyone volunteers for it to boot,” I said.

  “You just did, and you’re very smart.”

  “But feeling dumber by the minute.”

  “You were afraid. You said it yourself—and for good reason. Look at all the cases that have popped up around the country. And because the cases are so random geographically, it only increases the fear because you can’t logically explain it away. The victims are in urban and rural areas. Maybe they’re linked to terrorists, maybe not. All you know is that it could happen to you.”

  Something happened to me all right, and it wasn’t smallpox. “I’m an idiot.”

  Eddy set down his wine glass and put his arms around me. “And I still love you.”

  CHAPTER

  12

  I’D BEEN VIOLATED.

  Worse? I’d volunteered—no, that’s too charitable—I’d begged for it to happen. I’d made the drive, waited the day, and flung open the door to every critical identifier I had.

  The very worst, though, was now I knew I’d been violated. Where Monday morning should have been lighter on my mind, I sank into a nasty funk knowing that I now traveled the country, for all practical purposes, naked.

  I had one final insult that Monday. I was doing my inevitable dash with my carryon and computer bags from gate B89 to B22 in the Denver airport (a mile high and a mile long) and happened to glance at a new series of ads on a wall:

  What do you need to know?

  Who else needs to know it?

  What will you be able to do when you know it?

  Zaan: Now you can know it.

  The universe tilted slightly and my heart stopped. I nearly got run over by the man behind me. He swooped around me at the last second and left a nasty glance in my direction in his wake.

  I made it to my flight with less than five minutes to spare, but the pounding of my heart wasn’t from the sprint. For the next two hours, I only wanted to sleep and read and sleep some more. Instead, the last question kept rolling through my head: What will you be able to do when you know it? I kept thinking of all those draft dodgers from the Vietnam War and how they burned their draft cards. Their selective service information stayed locked up inside the Pentagon fort, so the card burning didn’t stop the machine. It only woke up a nation.

  This new war had produced a new card: my health card ticked away like a tiny bomb inside my wallet. I wanted to shred it and mail the pieces somewhere, but I didn’t know where to send it. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway since the card itself wasn’t the evil thing but a symbol of it. Still, I pictured myself on the corner of Tejon Street and Pikes Peak Avenue in Colorado Springs’ tiny downtown, taking scissors to my card or maybe swiping a magnet across the strip to wipe the information clean. Where was drama in that though?

  I’d been missed at Baja Breeze. I’m always missed when there’s a mess.

  Since nearly all of the Zaan consultants except me were local, the project had kept on marching, marching, marching toward a go-live that was now at least a month behind, if not two. Michael de Leon needed help documenting what had gone wrong on the client side, most of which had to do with their project manager’s inability to push her team on cleaning up the data and every other deadline. This took up the rest of my Monday, except for the hour the CEO had blocked out on my calendar to sort through how to communicate the, uh, shift in the schedule. That conversation was less productive since neither of us could openly talk about the mistake he’d made when he let himself get distracted by cleavage and long loose ebony hair.

  I did the best I could with Michael and the CEO, but the whole time I kept thinking, “Am I selling a national health card to these people?”

  I wasn’t. I was selling them on the benefits of being able to compare apples to apples—actually Gala apples to Gala apples—in their accounting, as opposed to their current system, which more or less compared apples to bicycles. Still, it hung with me that I’d been purchased by the Evil Database Empire, and that’s what I’d been selling to client after client.

  I needed to become Catholic so I could go to confession and do penance. And I needed a couple of Advil.

  By the time I got to the hotel, I was a wreck.

  I ordered room service and two glasses of wine. Not a good beginning to a week, but it was the only beginning I could deal with. I called Eddy, and didn’t get an answer, which left me with too much time on my computer. More specifically, it left me too much time to surf the Internet. That disease is contagious, too. I did an Ixquick search on “smallpox” and came up with over two million results. I poked around on the first twenty sites.

  One, smallpoxscare.com, had a load of information about the virus, much of which I’d already seen on the CDC site, but still very informative because it organized the information better. It had a very accurate and complete description of the invasiveness of the vaccination process, which I hadn’t seen anywhere else. If only Eddy had seen the post on Thursday, I could have made a more rational decision, but it hadn’t been posted until that morning. The site also included links to articles from all over the place and a chat room that listed toward conspiracy theories. Again, the list and the chat were surprisingly familiar. It wasn’t until I clicked on the map feature that I realized why I’d been experiencing a little déjà vu. The map and corresponding dots matched the one in our office, right down to the color-coding.

  Eddy had been a busy boy.

  I waited patiently to see if he’d pop up on gtalk or if he’d call first. Gtalk won.

  MRiderZAAN: Hey Eddio.

  EddytheWebMan: hey u

  MRiderZAAN: Found a great website. www.smallpoxscare.com Thought you’d find it interesting.

  There was a longer pause than I would have liked, but it wasn’t like I was surprised.

  EddytheWebMan: nailed me

  MRiderZAAN: Sure did. You’ve been busy.

  EddytheWebMan: someone had to do it

  MRiderZAAN: Call me.

  EddytheWebMan: xoxo

  MRiderZAAN: u2

  The phone rang a minute later.

  “You mad?” he asked before I could say, “Hello.”

  “How could I be mad? You’ve been right all along.”

  “She finally admits it. Fifteen years of marriage and she finally admits what I’ve been telling her for years. I’m right. I’ve always been right.”

  “About the smallpox thing,” I said.

  “Oh. Oh yeah,” he said

  “And maybe about how I parallel park,” I said.

  “Oh yeah. Definitely about how you parallel park,” he said.

  “So how long has the site been up?”

  “I finished it on Friday while you were in Denver. I was going to surprise you with it, but your details about getting the vaccination totally bummed me out. I didn’t want to even think about it.”

  “So how long have you been working on it?”

  “A while. I was going to tell you about it when I first started, but I was afraid it would make you mad that I was working on that and not something billable. You think I’m such a paranoid anyway.”

  “You are,” I said.

  “I am,” he said.

  “It’s a great site. It has tons of good stuff.” I clicked around while we talked. “Have you gotten a lot of hits?”

  “Take a guess.”

  “I don’t know.” A thousand hits would be nothing at all, but still pretty good for a first weekend. Yet I’d found it on Ixquick and checked it out first because it had a crisp and catchy description. “Maybe ten thousand?” As soon as I said it, I regretted it. I didn’t want to discourage him.

  Eddy laughed softly on the other end. “You’re not going
to believe this. As of this moment, it’s gotten 97,244 hits.”

  “What? Almost a hundred thousand hits in three days? Eddy, that’s incredible. Absolutely incredible! You’re not off by a decimal point are you?”

  “You mean did I get 972,440 hits? Nope, but we’ll see the day. Soon.”

  “What an irony. You get paid to do all these websites and the one you do on your own gets the hits.”

  “I know, I’ve been thinking all day about how to turn these hits into some money, but I don’t want to cheapen it with advertisements.”

  “Hey, if The New York Times can do it, why can’t you?”

  “Because I’m Eddy the Web Man. It just looks like I’m cashing in on a tragedy. I’m not going to do that.”

  His nobility touched me. Paranoia and all, he was a good man.

  “Do you love me, Eddy?” It just popped out. I knew the answer, but I had to hear it from him again. My Monday had been a train wreck. I couldn’t do the job anymore. I couldn’t turn chicken shit into chicken salad one more day.

  “More than life itself.” There was no pause. “More than a dog loves to scratch. More than a penguin loves to swim.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “More than a hawk loves to fly.”

  There was a long silence. I knew he was waiting for me to get teary but probably didn’t have a real clue why it would happen now.

  “Eddy?”

  “Yeah, Mz M?”

  “I figured out the most important question.”

  “What is it?”

  “Why do they need all this information?”

  “We have to know who needs it and what they’re going to do with it, too.”

  “True. But if we figure out the why, we’ll know everything else.”

  “You’re right. Again.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO FRIDAY. All along I’d survived my job because I found the work fun and intriguing. It was the travel that did me in. By Tuesday, I preferred the travel to the work. By Thursday, I was ready to be an insurgent.