Paul McEuen - Spiral

“ Worse , she releases it in a major population center but quietly . Say, sending in a Crawler to expel spores in the ventilation ducts of a building. The unsuspecting occupants come and go, and a whole city could be infected within days. If we picked it up in time, we might be able to shut it down. But to quarantine a city would be hell. It would start a panic like you can’t imagine.”

“Give me nightmare. ”

“She hits us a thousand places simultaneously. She cultures enough Uzumaki to load up all those Crawlers, disperses them across the country any number of ways. Hell, she could mail them to every major city, have them pop out of ten thousand envelopes all at once. She does something like that, we don’t have a chance.”

The room was silent. “Lay out our options.”

“Other than giving her what she wants, not much. Our best chance is to stop her before she releases it.”

“And if we don’t catch it?”

Arvenick said, “Antifungals don’t seem to work. A private company, Genesys, has a prototype vaccine. It’s not ready, but we’re going to run human tests. It’s a vaccine, not a cure. It does no good if the fungus has already spread. Maybe we could prevent a second wave, but that’s it.”

The President nodded, his hands on the table before him. Dunne tried to read his face. “Mr. President,” Dunne said, standing.

“Lawrence.”

“The health consequences are only the start. However bad they are, they pale in comparison to the broader implications. The entire country would be cut off, isolated. No airline flights. No one would get in or out. The stock market would crash in a way that would make 1929 look like a walk in the park. Within days, we would have shortages of all kinds—food, medicine, water—as trade shut down. We would become a Third World nation. The financial center of the world would move to London, or more likely Hong Kong. The United Nations would—”

“I’m aware of what would happen,” the President snapped. Then to Arvenick, “We’ve got nothing else?”

Arvenick shook his head. “Nothing good. We know that antibiotics make you vulnerable. We could ban antibiotic use, but in doing so we’d be signing thousands of death sentences. Not to mention we’d have a whole series of bacteriological epidemics sweeping the country. And even after all that, it might not help.”

“Why not?”

“We’ve assumed that those people who’d taken broad-spectrum antibiotics within the last few weeks would be at risk. That gives a maximum number of dead in the hundreds of thousands. But it might be much, much worse. If you believe Sadie Toloff at the USDA.”

Dunne jumped to attention at this. He’d heard nothing about revised estimates.

“Toloff’s piecing together what Liam Connor knew. She’s got a team of over forty scientists—fungal biologists, epidemiologists, gastrointestinal specialists—going through his notebooks. His published papers. It’s clear he was looking to find a cure for the Uzumaki.”

Dunne lost his patience. “Get to it.”

“Mr. President,” Arvenick said, pointedly ignoring Dunne. “We’ve known a long time that the Uzumaki infects humans after an antibiotic regimen. After the bacterial populations in the digestive tract are knocked down. But—and this is what Sadie Toloff is piecing together from Connor’s notebooks—he maintained we have in our appendix a specific bacterium that feeds on the Uzumaki. Like a parasite, the bacterium knocks the Uzumaki out, almost like a natural bacterial immune system.”

“And most people have this bacterium?” asked the President.

“Not quite, sir. Most people had it. But we’ve been using antibiotics for decades now. The bacterium might well be nearly wiped out in the human population. Once it gets killed by a course of antibiotics, it looks like it’s slow to come back.”

No one spoke. No one moved.

“General Arvenick, give me your best guess on casualties. How high?”

“Say on day one we have one person infected. And every day each infected person infects one more. At the end of one month, that adds up to over five hundred million.”

It was as if the air had been sucked out of the room.

THE JUMBO BOX OF MALTED MILK BALLS ARRIVED IN THE hands of Wally Atherton in his morning food package. Wally was a long-termer, had been in for twenty-two years, with only four to go. He ran a number of small businesses within the Hazelton prison. He was a middleman, making a living on the spread, trading cigarettes for junk food, and contraband booze for skin mags. He could even get you a cellphone if the price was right. Most of what he did was penny-ante, but on occasion he came across an opportunity to make some real cash.

This was far and away the biggest opportunity yet.

He’d first been contacted two months before, and he had been laying the groundwork since. The money was already flowing, building up in an account in a bank in Toledo, Ohio, his hometown. When he got out, he’d be a millionaire.

Atherton took the carton of malted milk balls, wrapped it in a bedsheet, put the buds from his iTouch in his ears, and started for the laundry room. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” serenaded him as he walked.

Once alone inside the laundry room, he placed the carton of malted milk balls on a folding table, opened it, and poured them out. They clattered and rolled, but the table had a little lip that kept them from falling to the floor. What the hell was malted milk, anyway?

He checked the chocolate balls until he found the specific one he was looking for. No malted anything here. It was a plastic sphere dipped in chocolate, designed to look and feel like all the other milk balls, but it was slightly larger. He popped it in his mouth and sucked off the chocolate. Then he wiped it down with a rag, took a razor blade he had stashed in his shoe and carefully cut the plastic shell open.

It split like a tiny egg. Inside was an amazing little thing.

A little mechanical spider, just as he’d been told. Glued to its back was the smallest damn camera he’d ever seen. The size of the dots on dice, no bigger. He leaned down to face it, then checked his iTouch. He could see his own face on the screen.

Wally hopped up on the table and set to work unscrewing the cover from the overhead vent. As he worked, he wondered if machines had a basic understanding of the world. They move, they respond, they move again. No free will, but an intelligence nonetheless. Wally was interested in free will. Someday a machine would have it, begin to carve out its own kind of meaning, he was sure. Not yet, but soon maybe.

This little bugger had no free will. It took its orders from the rich, faceless SOB who’d paid Wally one-point-four million dollars. This little bugger was an instrument of his will. Not that different from Wallace Atherton.

He did as ordered, placed the little Crawler in the duct, pointed it in the right direction. Then he hit the app on his iTouch and the Crawler took off down the vent, skittering away, Wally guiding it by running his finger across the screen. The sound of its legs was a delicate, almost lovely clitter-clatter.

To Wally it sounded like the echo of future coins of gold.

KITANO REMINISCED, FLAMES BURNING BRIGHT IN HIS MIND. Dunne was not due for another hour. In the meantime, Kitano had his memories. As he grew older, he found that the present became hazier, more like a dream, but the past became clearer and clearer. It was as if the past was real, the present only a shadow. His true self lived there, still watching, still waiting, still reliving the events of 1945.