Jeff Carlson - Plague Zone

Cam wore an air mask like the other man. One side of his beard had been scorched down to stubble, but she recognized his hair and the muscles along his neck, even though his dark skin was gray and shiny like wax.

“Miss, you can‘t—” someone said.

Her hand reached Cam’s shoulder as she burst into tears. Her grief was a lover’s and a friend‘s, wretched and deep. Stay with me, she thought. Be with me. We haven’t had our turn yet. Please.

There was nothing in his eyes except the slack, uncaring look of the plague, so unlike his anger or his strength. Ruth turned away even before another medic said, “Let us get him inside.” She nodded. It didn’t matter if they saw her head move or not. She was already retreating and the gesture was as much for herself as anyone else.

The gesture was his, tough-minded and succinct.

She would fight on with him or without him. She owed them that much, but she honestly wasn’t sure how far to take the next generation of nanotech. Where did self-defense become something more? Was it possible to draw the line at healing people when she knew how easily new advances would spread to everyone in the world?

As she walked away from the helicopter, the soldiers on board were met by two jeeps and more men. If anyone recognized her, they didn’t say. They were following orders, unloading carefully bagged computers, lab gear, and paperwork. Sorting through the material would be a colossal chore. Ruth wasn’t looking forward to it. The job would keep her mind off of Cam, but maybe worrying about him would have been better.

I can’t go back to that tent right now, she thought. I should. I have to. Instead, she walked onto the rutted earth beyond the chopper pads, drinking in the sky and the cold. Her body was as restless as her head.

I can’t.

Ruth had considered killing everyone else on Earth. She’d always thought her role was defensive, but what if it was time for her to launch her own attacks? She could become the planetary warlord that men like Senator Kendricks had envisioned as themselves.

Like earlier technologies, the mind plague and its vaccines were available for anyone to use. Soon enough, there might be yet another plague unless she preempted every enemy. No matter how vigilant they might be, there was no way to know who was becoming a threat. Russia. India. Japan. Brazil. Even on her own side, there would be people who insisted on developing their own weapons without her. Steve McCown was dead, killed in Grand Lake, and Meghna Katechia was missing, possibly taken by the Chinese, but there must be other survivors with at least a rudimentary knowledge of nanotech. Overseas, there would be more.

The same curiosity and ambition that made Homo sapiens such an appealing success was also a weakness. Their intelligence was a double-edged sword. Ruth believed the next step in their evolution must be to grow beyond their own suspicion and greed. Maybe they were already too late. The environment was in tatters. War had become a reflex. Her faith was the only thing that had grown stronger.

None of what happened needed to be in vain. All of them had done well, achieving more than anyone had a right to expect. That was also true of their opponents among the Chinese.

Ruth was feeling superstitious. She could almost grasp the pattern that had unfolded. Her premonition of losing Cam had even come true, though differently than she’d expected.

Deborah and Kendra’s places in the puzzle were undeniable. Ruth only wished she knew where to find Sarah Foshtomi. In a sense, Foshtomi had saved Ruth by causing the accident that infected her. Maybe the young woman had been instrumental in helping Cam, too? Ruth hoped so. Like so many people, Foshtomi was missing, probably dead, but her life hadn’t been without consequence.

Ruth would never have imagined a new mind plague if there hadn’t been another war — and without the war, she wouldn’t have possessed this next-generation technology.

What if that was why she was still alive?

She had failed the responsibilities that came with her education. Now she had another chance, and even greater tools at hand. Freedman’s mind plague offered an intriguing possibility. Ruth did not doubt that some people would argue for doing to the Chinese exactly what had been planned for them, turning their enemies into laborers and slaves.

There was a better way. Ruth could force a lasting peace. She would need to see what sort of progress the Chinese researchers had made, but if the secondary programs they’d developed were as sophisticated as she expected, her idea was to selectively interfere with the brain functions of everyone on the planet. She could release her own mind plague, not only destroying their memories of nanotech but limiting their aggression, their hate, and their imagination. She’d do it to herself as well. Once those traits were curbed, she would have altered the human race, making a change so fundamental that no one knew why or how it had been done.

Ruth couldn’t hide their true nature forever. It would persist in books and digital files, even if they were unable to comprehend certain words or concepts. The mental block would be that complete — but eventually, maybe lifetimes from now, someone would unlock the truth. They might begin to teach themselves nanotechnology again. They would experiment with the mysteries concealed in their own DNA, rediscovering the power of fear and rage. In the meantime there would be peace. They would be different, calmer and less selfish. Maybe they could learn new ways of working together. The environment itself would heal.

The paradox she felt was agonizing. Ruth was afraid to cut away a major part of human nature for the same reasons she would never commit genocide outright. She didn’t want to become a monster even if her motives were for the best. What if there were side effects? If she inhibited their most basic drives, they might lose the skills they needed to persist in this fractured world. But the fighting had to end. Another war would destroy them.

Go back to your tent, she thought, glancing out across the first stars in the evening sky. You owe so much to so many people. Go back to your tent and tell Beymer you want the Chinese records now. Tonight.

Developing a new mind plague would take months, maybe longer, but she couldn’t ignore her own urgency. The race had begun. It would be wrong for her to ignore a solution when it was within her abilities, wouldn’t it?

Don’t be wrong again.

Ruth walked back to her tent.

The light beyond her tiny lab was dim and green in the tent’s canvas when a man called outside. “Dr. Goldman? He’s awake.”

Ruth glanced up from her computer with mixed feelings of joy, relief, and self-doubt. Three days had passed. It was morning. She saved her work and shut the laptop down, hiding what she doing in case Beymer sent anyone into her tent while she was gone. She thought somebody had investigated her equipment before during one of her short breaks.

She pushed through the plastic inside the tent and then a second compartment like an airlock, finding a soldier she recognized from the post-op units. “How is he?” she asked.

“Stabilized. Very weak.”

“Thank you.”

The soldier led her to a stunted-looking building buried partway in the earth. They went down six stairs into the concrete structure, then to the third door on the left. Ruth had developed a compulsion about numbers. She knew Cam was two more doors down, five total, not six like the stairs. It was a meaningless equation but she worried about it just the same — five, not six — as if trying to fight down her heartbeat.

The third door led to a nurse’s station. The narrow space was cluttered with water jugs, a sink, and bloody laundry. Ruth washed up. The soldier gave her a cloth mask and a baggy suit to cover her uniform.