Dan Brown: Inferno

“Fertility,” Langdon said, startled that the parallel had not occurred to him earlier. Fruitfulness. Population .

“Yes, fertility,” Sienna replied. “Bertrand used the term ‘chthonic monster’ to represent the ominous threat of our own fecundity. He described our overproduction of offspring as a monster looming on the horizon … a monster we needed to contain immediately, before it consumed us all.”

Our own virility stalks us , Langdon realized. The chthonic monster. “And Bertrand battled this monster … how?”

“Please understand,” she said defensively, “these are not easy problems to solve. Triage is always a messy process. A man who severs the leg of a three-year-old child is a horrific criminal … until that man is a doctor who saves the child from gangrene. Sometimes the only choice is the lesser of two evils.” She began tearing up again. “I believe Bertrand had a noble goal … but his methods …” She looked away, on the verge of breaking down.

“Sienna,” Langdon whispered gently. “I need to understand all of this. I need you to explain to me what Bertrand did. What did he release into the world?”

Sienna faced him again, her soft brown eyes radiating a darker fear. “He released a virus,” she whispered. “A very specific kind of virus.”

Langdon held his breath. “Tell me.”

“Bertrand created something known as a viral vector . It’s a virus intentionally designed to install genetic information into the cell it’s attacking.” Sienna paused to let him process the idea. “A vector virus … rather than killing its host cell … inserts a piece of predetermined DNA into that cell, essentially modifying the cell’s genome.”

Langdon struggled to grasp her meaning. This virus changes our DNA?

“The insidious nature of this virus,” Sienna continued, “is that none of us know it has infected us. No one gets sick. It causes no overt symptoms to suggest that it’s changing us genetically.”

For a moment Langdon could feel the blood pulsing in his veins. “And what changes does it make?”

Sienna closed her eyes for a moment. “Robert,” she whispered, “as soon as this virus was released into the cistern’s lagoon, a chain reaction began. Every person who descended into that cavern and breathed the air became infected. They became viral hosts … unwitting accomplices who transferred the virus to others, sparking an exponential proliferation of disease that will now have torn across the planet like a forest fire. By now, the virus will have penetrated the global population. You, me … everyone .”

Langdon rose from the bench and began pacing frantically before her. “And what does it do to us?” he repeated.

Sienna was silent for a long moment. “The virus has the ability to render the human body … infertile.” She shifted uncomfortably. “Bertrand created a sterility plague.”

Her words struck Langdon hard. A virus that makes us infertile ? Langdon knew there existed viruses that could cause sterility, but a highly contagious airborne pathogen that could do so by altering us genetically seemed to belong in another world … some kind of Orwellian dystopia of the future.

“Bertrand often theorized about a virus like this,” Sienna said quietly, “but I never imagined he would attempt to create it … much less succeed. When I got his letter and learned what he had done, I was in shock. I tried desperately to find him, to beg him to destroy his creation. But I arrived too late.”

“Hold on,” Langdon interjected, finally finding his voice. “If the virus makes everyone on earth infertile, there will be no new generations, and the human race will start dying out … immediately.”

“Correct,” she responded, her voice sounding small. “Except extinction was not Bertrand’s goal — quite the opposite, in fact — which is why he created a randomly activating virus. Even though Inferno is now endemic in all human DNA and will be passed along by all of us from this generation forward, it will ‘activate’ only in a certain percentage of people. In other words, the virus is now carried by everyone on earth, and yet it will cause sterility in only a randomly selected part of the population.”

“What … part ?” Langdon heard himself say, incredulous even to be asking such a question.

“Well, as you know, Bertrand was fixated on the Black Death — the plague that indiscriminately killed one third of the European population. Nature, he believed, knew how to cull itself. When Bertrand did the math on infertility, he was exhilarated to discover that the plague’s death rate of one in three seemed to be the precise ratio required to start winnowing the human population at a manageable rate.”

That’s monstrous , Langdon thought.

“The Black Plague thinned the herd and paved the way for the Renaissance,” she said, “and Bertrand created Inferno as a kind of modern-day catalyst for global renewal — a Transhumanist Black Death — the difference being that those manifesting the disease, rather than perishing, would simply become infertile. Assuming Bertrand’s virus has taken hold, one third of the world’s population is now sterile … and one third of the population will continue to be sterile for all time. The effect would be similar to that of a recessive gene … which gets passed along to all offspring, and yet exerts its influence in only a small percentage of them.”

Sienna’s hands were shaking as she continued. “In Bertrand’s letter to me, he sounded quite proud, saying he considered Inferno to be a very elegant and humane resolution of the problem.” Fresh tears formed in her eyes, and she wiped them away. “Compared to the virulence of the Black Death, I admit there is some compassion in this approach. There will be no hospitals overflowing with the sick and dying, no bodies rotting in the streets, and no anguished survivors enduring the death of loved ones. Humans will simply stop having so many babies. Our planet will experience a steady reduction in our birth rate until the population curve actually inverts, and our total numbers begin to decrease.” She paused. “The result will be far more potent than the plague, which only briefly curbed our numbers, creating a temporary dip in the graph of human expansion. With Inferno, Bertrand created a long-term solution, a permanent solution … a Transhumanist solution. He was a germ-line genetic engineer. He solved problems at the root level.”

“It’s genetic terrorism …” Langdon whispered. “It’s changing who we are, who we’ve always been, at the most fundamental level.”

“Bertrand didn’t see it that way. He dreamed of fixing the fatal flaw in human evolution … the fact that our species is simply too prolific. We are an organism that, despite our unmatched intellect, cannot seem to control our own numbers. No amount of free contraception, education, or government enticement works. We keep having babies … whether we want to or not. Did you know the CDC just announced that nearly half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unplanned? And, in underdeveloped nations, that number is over seventy percent!”

Langdon had seen these statistics before and yet only now was he starting to understand their implications. As a species, humans were like the rabbits that were introduced on certain Pacific islands and allowed to reproduce unchecked to the point that they decimated their ecosystem and finally went extinct.

Bertrand Zobrist has redesigned our species … in an attempt to save us … transforming us into a less fruitful population.