While Viola grabbed only the most necessary items and ordered a transport capsule to her door, she couldn’t help think that — Katie aside — the timing of an outbreak at the BMC couldn’t possibly have been worse. The stress-test which was underway to test Arkadia’s infrastructure in a faux emergency had ironically increased the severity of this real emergency, by clustering so many people in the affected area. The specific time of day was even worse, coming just when a large number of children were undergoing their medical check-ups.
Christian spoke under these rueful thoughts in sharing some of his own, explaining that an over-reliance on microspheres as atmospheric boundaries may have unwittingly opened the door for this kind of issue. The major divisions on Arkadia, as well as being fewer in number than on Terradox, were not strict zonal divisions which ran to the romosphere’s core, but were rather, in effect, surface-level bubbles. This enabled significantly greater adaptability than the zonal system irreversibly built into Terradox by Roger Morrison, its maniacal creator, but it did so at a cost that had only now become clear.
The lack of impenetrable subterranean boundaries, while having no effect on separating surface conditions which varied far less extremely between adjacent areas than was the case on Terradox, offered no protection against a previously unacknowledged possibility: that of root systems spreading beneath the surface, enabling genetically engineered, mutation-prone and potentially dangerous plant species to reach areas they weren’t meant for.
Robert insisted that Christian Jackson, Terradox’s Head of Botany, didn’t believe sabotage was a serious possibility; for although engineering plants which could eventually poison Arkadia’s air like ticking botanical time-bombs may have sounded like a subtle way to destroy the project and everyone involved, Christian saw a simpler explanation as by far the most likely.
With so much of Arkadia being unnatural, he said, unpredictability was part and parcel of the project. He believed that plants may have mutated in ways that he and others didn’t expect due to a reaction to soil conditions they weren’t made for. “These aren’t natural plants and this isn’t natural soil,” Christian said. “Your whole environment is unnatural, just like here, so we can’t take anything we think we know for granted.”
Unfortunately Christian could be of no more immediate help given that he hadn’t been involved in any of the design or stock-building processes for the Arkadian Botanical Gardens or any other site.
Robert’s natural desire to know everything led him to delegate his own assistants to talk to various people at once, as soon as possible, and to brief him on the double. Those assistants were currently gathering as much information as they could from Christian’s counterparts in Arkadia’s Botany division.
Within a few minutes, Viola was not only en route to the Shipyard but also found herself in the upside-down position of offering moral support to Nisha while she herself was in no real state to do so. Nisha was hysterical, however, having been obliviously unaware at work until this most unwelcome of all calls came through.
“I wish I had taken Vijay, then he wouldn’t be in there alone,” Nisha sobbed, weakened by the thought of her brother having no one at his side in the BMC. “But he wanted to go by himself… he didn’t want any of us to take him! He wants to be grown up so bad.”
“I didn’t go with Katie, either,” Viola said, sharing the same painful regret, “but they’re not alone. They have each other, Kayla is in there with Patch, and some of Peter’s top security staff are in there, too. Nisha, they might not have us right now, but they are not alone.”
“It’s just… first Chase, and now this…” Nisha went on, still crying.
“Bo is on the same Karrier as Chase and Katie is in the same room as Vijay,” Viola replied, not impatiently but certainly insistently. “We’re in this thing together, Nisha. My dad has already called your dad to the Shipyard, and no one knows more than him about manipulating atmospheric conditions. And no one knows more about Habitat Management and taking care of the practicalities of the barriers than my dad, so we’re all going to get through this… together.”
In an odd way, comforting Nisha forced Viola to be strong and talking through the situation allowed her to move beyond her own feelings of helplessness and towards a more practical mindset.
Her arrival at the Shipyard came just a few moments before her husband Peter’s, allowing them to enter and unite with Robert together; though not before an emotional but pragmatically brief embrace.
As soon as the door swung open, the tone changed.
“How could you do something like this without Executive Council approval?” Peter barked at Robert as soon as he saw him. Further into the room, young communications officer Bradley Reinhart sat awkwardly, coordinating various communications channels but unable to ignore the tension around him.
“It was urgent,” Robert replied in kind. “I have two votes and I’m not dropping this on Chase. So even if you had both voted against isolating the BMC, and even if protocol had been for Holly to split the decision again — which it isn’t for an Arkadian matter like this — there was no time to ask her. With the comms delay each way, that’s time I didn’t have!”
“My daughter is in there!” Peter growled.
“And my granddaughter,” Robert more calmly stated. “There are other just-as-innocent people in there, too, Peter, and we’re going to get them out. What we need is calm heads.”
Peter shook his head and looked away. “You’re only even on the Council because of how old you are and whose dad you are. You bring nothing to this table, and you’re only sitting in that chair at the end of it because Viola didn’t want it and Holly and Grav didn’t want to make a public choice between me and Chase. Don’t think everyone out there doesn’t know that!”
“You want to do this now?” Robert asked.
When Peter opened his mouth to reply, Viola cut him off before any sound could escape. “Both of you just back off!” she yelled. “Bo is hurtling towards an asteroid and Katie is trapped inside a live biohazard zone, and we’re arguing with each other?”
Neither man said anything; both knew she was right.
“You said Romesh was coming,” Viola said to Robert, impatience and urgency tinging the words.
“He’s on the way.”
Peter nodded firmly; this was some good news at last, given that Romesh’s experiences in Terradox’s Primosphere were the closest anyone could call upon in the current situation.
“Who do we have on the inside of the barrier?” Viola asked. “Because with the best will in the world, Kayla probably isn’t going to excel in this kind of situation. Is Vic there with them, too?”
“Vic is in the BMC, but not with Patch and Katie,” Peter said. “He was on duty nearer the entrance so I think he’s locked away from them in another sector.”
Robert nodded glumly in confirmation.
“So who is in there with Katie?” Viola pushed.
“Pavel,” her father replied. “Little Sophie is at home, at least, but Pavel is in there.”
Peter and Viola both breathed visible sighs of relief at both points. The presence of their old friend and loyal home security guard wouldn’t solve any problems, but Katie knew Pavel well and would feel more at ease with him than she would have without him.
The door swung open again, heralding Romesh’s arrival.
“And Vijay is there,” Robert added, suddenly reminded of that point. “Quite seriously, he’ll be more helpful than most of the adults who might have been in his place.”
“No one will be in there for long,” Romesh announced with a confidence alien to the others. He got straight to business without so much as looking directly at anyone else, setting up a large screen on the communication office’s empty wall.
“This was caused by an adverse biological reaction to variable conditions,” he spoke as he worked, “and we can manipulate those conditions to reverse the reaction.”
He placed the huge virtual touchsc
reen on the wall by tapping his wristband against the points of his four desired corners and saying the words “adaptive analytics” out loud. He then turned to Robert. “You need to grant full permissions for me to be able to use this to modify anything.”
With full trust and no hesitation, Robert spoke clearly into Romesh’s wristband: “Harrington one, RXDBA 22812, granting full read-write permissions.”
The others didn’t quite follow, but if Romesh’s confidence wasn’t quite contagious it did at least work to lift the overbearing feeling of dread.
“If Nancy and the other work we carried out in the Primosphere taught me anything,” Romesh went on, “it’s that seemingly minuscule changes in atmospheric conditions — above ground or below — can cause rapid mutations. This is particularly true in non-naturally occurring organisms like Nancy or most of the research plants on Arkadia. By applying what we know, we can fix this within the hour. All I need to wait for is the Analytics team to put together some metrics to go along with the physical mapping, so we can address this on a person-by-person basis and an aggregate basis at the same time. The trends and patterns we see will inform how we deal with the rescue.”
Viola still didn’t know exactly what Romesh was talking about when he mentioned the Analytics team, but the way the word ‘rescue’ effortlessly rolled off his tongue was music to her ears.
A certain glimmer in Romesh’s eye quietly suggested that he may have been viewing this as more than a problem to be solved, and perhaps as a road to the redemption he sought following recent regrettable events. Having lost standing and respect in the eyes of many for acting selfishly by dangerously expediting the Nancy project without permission during his final months on Terradox, Romesh Kohli most definitely had some redeeming to do. His own reputation had suffered far more damage than his family’s as a whole, largely since his daughter Nisha and wife Farrah were admired for what they brought to the table in their own right, but his son Vijay hadn’t looked at him the same way since the Nancy project came to an unceremonious end.
This had been far harder for Romesh to take than the similar looks he’d been getting from others, but without question his driving motivation was liberating his son from the confines of the BMC and seeing him again in person — whatever the look on his face.
“Mr Harrington, Mr Kohli,” Bradley Reinhart announced from his work console at the back of the communications office. “The toxic compound has been identified and we can now track its spread to pinpoint the areas with the highest concentration of the pathogen. The Analytics team have pushed some data to our maps already.”
No one knew if pathogen was really the right word, but they understood the intended meaning and it seemed as good a descriptor as any other.
Bradley pulled up the data, presented as a top-down visual layout of the BMC. Carefully designed, the development was divisible into sectors by a series of concentric circles. The outermost circle, encompassing an outdoor area as well as a number of rooms, was marked GZ. “This is ground zero,” he explained. “This is where a small patch of soil was breached and the pathogen entered the BMC’s controlled atmosphere. The consensus is that Christian is broadly right in what he said. We can talk details later but it seems as though the lack of zonal divisions deep underground allowed roots to spread, and the wrong kind of soil combined with the wrong kind of air has led to an unexpected mutation. These aren’t natural plants and this isn’t natural soil, as you’ve been saying. All open soil across Arkadia has been automatically and temporarily sealed off from the atmosphere at large by basic romotech cloaking, so this shouldn’t happen anywhere else.”
“I don’t know what those readings mean,” Viola readily admitted as she gazed at unintelligible numerical data and Latin-looking words full of X’s and Y’s and L’s.
“From what I’m hearing, these are toxins,” Bradley said, “and the readings are alarming.”
“That one right there is the culprit,” Robert said, scanning the whole screen and then pointing to a barely pronounceable word next to the number 3.203. “A reading of one would mean the concentration was at the absolute limit of acceptable exposure. A reading of two would mean the concentration was double the absolute limit of acceptable exposure.”
“For how long?” Peter asked, speaking for all of the others.
“A minute.”
“But that’s just health and safety stuff,” Romesh said, trying to diminish Robert’s concern. “It’s like the recommended dose for vitamins or medicine. You can have a lot more than it says… the thresholds are conservatively low. My map on the wall is going to let us track each individual’s condition and enact an individualised plan of ac—”
“The current air toxicity at ground zero is three times the limit and still growing, Romesh,” Robert interrupted. “That isn’t something we can dismiss out of hand! If we don’t do anything to deal with this on a broad and non-individual scale, the people in that sector will definitely be dead within the hour — and that’s not speculation.”
These words were very alarming in themselves, but the urgency was underlined by the fact that the figure, previously 3.203, was already 3.211 by the time Romesh finished his explanation.
After a few seconds of pensive silence, Viola shared a thought: “We know that some people are seriously ill, but so far they’re all inside the ground zero sector… correct?”
Bradley nodded.
“But we don’t know if whatever they’re suffering from can be transmitted human-to-human, or if the toxin could eventually make its way through the romotech barriers we’ve put up to keep it in place?”
“There are a lot of things we don’t know,” Robert answered on Bradley’s behalf.
Viola turned to Romesh. “If this had happened within a microsphere in the Primosphere — if a plant had mutated in a way you didn’t expect and suddenly released toxins into the air — you could have dealt with it, right? You could have majorly and instantaneously modified conditions to eliminate what essentially would have been a biological and, well, killable problem?”
“Easily,” Romesh said. “I can see why you ask, because eliminating the problem at ground zero really should eliminate it altogether before there is any prospect of further mutation or pathogenic spread. I could do the same thing here if there weren’t any people in that sector. But, naturally, whatever kills the problem also kills the people.”
“Further mutation could endanger everyone on Arkadia,” Viola said, “not just everyone deeper inside the BMC. Bradley… exactly how many people are inside that sector? How many people are at ground zero?”
“Fourteen,” he said.
An oppressive silence circled the room.
“How many children?” she pressed.
Bradley gulped. “None.”
Viola’s face whitened as she turned to gauge the reactions of her husband and her father. The two were looking at each other. “Sometimes there’s no good option,” she said, drawing their attention. “Sometimes you have to do a really bad thing…”
twenty-nine
For a few tense moments, no one shot down Viola’s idea of sacrificing the few for the benefit of the many.
“I watched Holly shoot Remy Bouchard when he was standing in the way of saving Boyce’s hostages,” she said, trying to justify her difficult suggestion against the oppressive glances of her friends and family. “Sometimes it has to be done!”
“We have the option of a full evacuation,” Robert said, still stopping short of dismissing the alternative out of hand. “All non-essential personnel currently on the safe side of the line can be loaded into—”
Romesh sighed out a loud interruption. “Robert, until I have full data from the Analytics team we won’t know if some people who are on the safe side of the line now might be carrying something they picked up earlier — when they ventured into the BMC for their own appointments earlier today. The incubation period, if this is even a virus, would only have to be a few hours for that to be a major pro
blem. We would have to quarantine before we think—”
“Under no circumstances is Arkadia being evacuated today,” Viola interjected. “For one thing, we’re not giving up. For two, like Romesh just said, people have already been exposed to whatever is causing this. We’re not bringing sickness to Earth or Terradox. But right now I’m concerned with making sure that sickness doesn’t reach Katie. You can talk about cloaks blocking anything else coming up from the soil, you can talk about sectors and barriers stopping pathogens from reaching other parts of the BMC, but we didn’t see this problem coming before it hit us.”
“Instead of evacuating, we could put everyone in The Mound,” Romesh suggested.
“We do need to lock everything down,” Peter chimed in. Ideas were now flying from all angles and often competing with each other, but he was apparently in agreement with Romesh, at least.
Viola shook her head. “I want that space for these people — everyone we get out of the BMC. Everyone else will be comfortable enough either where they are or at home, if we want to go into full lockdown, but it’s a lot easier and more sensible to move hundreds of people who might be infected than tens of thousands of people who almost definitely aren’t.” She turned to Bradley. “Can you make sure the people in charge of The Mound are ready for an influx once we deal with this? And Dad, we’ll need a clear pathway blocked off between the BMC and The Mound so we can move people without exposing them to the wider atmosphere… and maybe more importantly without exposing the external atmosphere to whatever they might be carrying. We can quarantine them there until we know for sure that they’re okay.”
This idea of Viola’s was better received, given its inherent logic and lack of moral dubiousness. No one had to ask why she chose The Mound as a suggested site for quarantining survivors from the BMC; it was self-enclosed, it was enormous, and it was already fully stocked with emergency provisions and beds for far more people than they’d be sending there.
Terradox Beyond Page 20
