Chris Moriarty - Spin Control

“I have to believe people are more reasonable than that—”

“If there’s one thing people can be depended on not to be in a crisis, it’s reasonable!”

“—take someone like Laid-back Ahmed, for instance. He’s certainly not prejudiced.”

“As you once pointed out to me, love and politics are two very different things.”

“You knew about Bella and Ahmed?”

“Of course. It’s obvious. Just look at the way they look at each other.”

“If it’s so obvious to you, then how come their home Syndicates didn’t figure out what they are?”

“What makes you think they haven’t?”

“But how could they be crazy enough to put the whole mission, or half of it anyway, in the hands of a man who’s been through renorming ? What’s wrong, Arkasha? Why are you looking at me like that? Oh Arkasha. No. Not you. How could they have?”

Arkasha had rolled onto his stomach. Arkady couldn’t see his face, only the dark hair feathering the pillow. He rubbed at the back of Arkasha’s neck, the way he would have done to soothe a frightened puppy.

“When did it happen?”

“Five…no, six years ago.”

“Tell me about it?”

Nothing.

“Please?”

“The worst thing,” Arkasha began, his voice muffled less by the pillow than by the same wrenching humiliation Arkady had heard in Ahmed’s voice, “the worst thing is how horribly nice everyone is about it. It’s not the Bellas of the world who work in the renorming centers. They’re dedicated, well-intentioned, idealistic professionals. They want to help you. They want to make you better.” He spat the last word out as if it tasted bad.

“And did they?”

“They made me learn to keep my stupid mouth shut. Is that better?”

Arkady leaned down to kiss his hair.

“There’s nothing like a stint on the euth ward to make you realize that you’re expendable,” Arkasha went on. “And the thing is, I didn’t really think I was expendable. I was the best, after all. At everything. Didn’t that mean I set the norm? Didn’t it mean I was the new norm? And I’m not egotistical or selfish. If I complained, it was because I wanted things to be better for everyone, not just for me.”

“So what happened in the end?”

“Nothing. I shut my mouth and worked my ass off and published my first paper out of the renorming center. And that was the end of that. They called me in for an evaluation, and I pretended to be cured, and they pretended to believe I was cured, and I packed my bag and went home and got back to work. Because it turned out that even if I was expendable, my work wasn’t.”

“But it must have changed you.”

“It made me work a hell of a lot harder, I can tell you that.”

“Be serious, Arkasha!”

Arkasha rolled over on his back and finally met Arkady’s eyes. His expression was intent, searching. “Would you believe me if I told you that you were the first person I’d slept with since then?”

He pulled Arkady down to him and kissed his eyes, his forehead, the bridge of his nose, the corner of his mouth. Arkady wanted to return the kisses, but there was still a last question he had to ask. “Why did they send you?”

“That’s the craziest thing of all. No one ever told me. I still don’t know. I don’t have the faintest clue.” He held Arkady tight and buried his face in his hair so that his last words were muffled to near inaudibility. “All I know is if I ever get sent back again, I’ll kill myself.”

“Wake up the tacticals?” Arkasha burst out, not two minutes into the consult that followed on the news of what they’d all started calling Bella’s situation. “Are you insane?”

“You’ve been saying yourself since before we even landed that Novalis is all wrong,” By-the-Book Ahmed countered. “Now we know why. And we know what to do about it too!”

“But you can’t turn the tacticals loose on Novalis!” Arkasha was pale with anger and frustration, knowing that he wasn’t carrying the room with him but unable to give up and acquiesce to the emerging consensus. If you could call it a consensus, Arkady thought bitterly, when half the team had plainly made up their minds before they ever sat down at the table. “This planet is irreplaceable, unprecedented! Priceless genetic material!”

“Priceless genetic material for you to exploit for your own egotistical and selfish reasons.”

“That’s unfair!”

“Is it? Really? Who are you really thinking about, Arkasha?”

“Look,” Laid-back Ahmed said, still faithfully trying to keep the peace. “Let’s at least hear what Aurelia and Arkasha have to say before we start shouting at each other. The least we can do is make up our minds based on facts, not opinions.”

“Basically,” Aurelia said, “the virus has hitched a ride on our collective immune system.”

She tore a sheet of paper from her notebook and began sketching bold lines and circles to illustrate her point. One circle was labeled susceptible individuals, another immune individuals, another asymptomatic carriers. Under her hands, the lines and circles quickly mustered into the standard flowchart that illustrated the way diseases and immunities spread through human and Syndicate populations.

“The collective immune system—of which the Motai version is the most aggressive—operates along the same lines as horizontal DNA transfer between virus variants within an infected host. It’s an intelligent adaptation to life in space. The human immune system evolved on Earth, where you had large, genetically diverse, low-density populations living in the open air or in primitive, well-ventilated dwellings. Disease spread slowly, and even major epidemics were no real threat in evolutionary terms since the overall population was always large enough to buffer against excess mortality. In that environment there’s actually a major evolutionary advantage to letting diseases spread widely enough to elicit a diversity of immune responses and avoid immunodominance problems.

“But in the Syndicates, we have tiny populations with minimal genetic diversity living on space stations where pathogens spread like wildfire. A severe epidemic can literally wipe out an entire geneline; it happened several times before we developed the current immunological splices. So our immune systems are designed with one goal in mind: killing new pathogens before they have a chance to get a foothold…even if that means giving up on the Earth-evolved mechanisms that ensure a diverse and balanced immune response in the longer, evolutionary timescale. We’ve used two tools to do it: horizontal DNA transfer that confers ‘inherited’ immunity without the time lag of waiting for genes to be passed on to the next generation; and a hard-hitting, fast-maturing immune response profile.

“Both splices are double-edged swords. And Novalis has turned them both against us. I can’t tell you if the virus is designed to infect us or not,” she finished darkly, “but I can tell you that the fit couldn’t be more perfect.”

As if by some tacit agreement, all eyes turned to Arkasha.

“Bottom line?” Arkasha said, speaking directly to By-the-Book Ahmed. “It’s not a weapon. It’s a terraforming tool. The most brilliant terraforming tool anyone could imagine. A viral search engine that expands its population—and therefore its parallel processing capacity—by jumping into every new species it encounters. And then expands it some more by pushing infected individuals into evolutionary overdrive. It’s a diversity machine. And it’s created a global red queen regime where every organism on this planet is running and running just to make the world stand still.”