Second Shift - Order

“Well,” Donald asked. “Were we?”

“I never saw a design with a hundred percent efficiency,” Erskine said. “We weren’t there with our own work, and theirs was much cruder. But what they had already would’ve taken out most. That part’s true enough.” He resumed his walk through the field of sleeping corpses. “Even the most severe epidemics burn themselves out,” he said, “so it’s difficult to say. I argued for countermeasures. Victor argued for this.” He spread his arms over the quiet assembly.

“And Victor won.”

“Indeed.”

“Do you think he… had second thoughts? Is that why… ?”

Erskine stopped at one of the pods and placed both hands on its icy surface. “I’m sure we all have second thoughts,” he said sadly. “But I don’t think Vic ever doubted the rightness of this mission. I don’t know why he did what he did in the end. It wasn’t like him.”

Donald peered inside the pod Erskine had led him to. There was a middle-aged woman inside, her eyelids covered in frost.

“My daughter,” Erskine said. “My only child.”

There was a moment of silence. It allowed the faint hum of a thousand pods to be heard. It could’ve been a choir of monks making that sound, a quiet hum on so many closed lips.

“When Thurman made the decision to wake his Anna, all I could dream about was doing the same. But why? There was no reason, no need for her expertise. Caroline was an accountant. And besides, it wouldn’t be fair to drag her from her dreams.”

Donald wanted to ask if it would ever be fair. What world did Erskine expect his daughter to ever see again? When would she wake to a normal life? A pleasant life?

“When I found nanos in her blood, I knew this was the right thing to do.” He turned to Donald. “I know you’re looking for answers, son. We all are. This is a cruel world. It’s always been a cruel world. I spent my whole life looking for ways to make it better, to patch things up, dreaming of an ideal. But for every sot like me, there’s ten more out there getting their jollies trying to tear things down. And it only takes one of them to get lucky.”

Donald flashed back to the day Thurman had given him The Order. That thick book was the start of his plummet into madness. He remembered their talk in that massive lozenge of a medical unit, the feeling of being infected, the paranoia that something harmful and invisible was invading him. But if Erskine and Thurman were telling the truth, he’d been infected long before that.

“You weren’t poisoning me that day.” He looked from the pod to Erskine, piecing something together. “The interview with Thurman, the weeks and weeks he spent in that chamber having all of those meetings. You weren’t infecting us.”

Erskine nodded ever so slightly. “We were healing you,” he said.

Donald felt a sudden flash of anger. “Then why not heal everyone?” he demanded.

“We discussed that. I had the same thought. To me, it was an engineering problem. I wanted to build countermeasures, machines to kill machines before they got to us. Thurman had similar ideas. He saw it as an invisible war, one we desperately needed to take to the enemy. We all saw the battles we were accustomed to fighting, you see. Me in the bloodstream, Thurman overseas. It was Victor who set the two of us straight.”

Erskine pulled a cloth from his breast pocket and removed his glasses. He rubbed them while he talked, his voice echoing in whispers from the walls. “Victor said there would be no end to it. He pointed to computer viruses to make his case, how one might run rampant and cripple hundreds of millions of machines. Sooner or later, some nano attack would get through, get out of control, and there would be an epidemic built on bits of code rather than strands of DNA.”

“So what?” Donald asked. “We’ve dealt with plagues before. Why would this be different?” He swept his arms at the pods. “Tell me how the solution isn’t worse than the problem?”

As worked up as he felt, he also sensed how much angrier he would be if he heard this from Thurman. He wondered if he’d been set up to have a kindlier man, a stranger, take him aside and tell him what Thurman thought he needed to hear. It was hard not to be paranoid about being manipulated, to not feel the strings still knotted to his joints.

“Psychology,” Erskine replied. He put his glasses back on. “This is where Victor set us straight, why our ideas would never work. I’ll never forget the conversation. We were sitting in the cafeteria at Walter Reed. Thurman was there to hand out ribbons, but really to meet with the two of us.” He shook his head. “It was crowded in there. If anyone knew the things we were discussing…”

“Psychology,” Donald reminded him. “Tell me how this is better. More people die this way.”

Erskine snapped back to the present. “That’s where we were wrong, just like you. Imagine the first discovery that one of these epidemics was man-made—the panic, the violence that would ensue. That’s where the end would come. A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in damage, and what do we do?” Erskine interlocked his fingers. “We come together. We put the pieces back. But a terrorist’s bomb.” He frowned. “A terrorist’s bomb does the same damage, and it throws the world into turmoil.”

He spread his hands apart like an explosion going off.

“When there’s only God to blame, we forgive him. When it’s our fellow man, we must destroy him.”

Donald shook his head. He didn’t know what to believe. But then he thought about the fear and rage he’d felt when he thought he’d been infected by something in that chamber. Meanwhile, he never worried about the billions of creatures swimming in his gut and doing so since the day he was born.

“We can’t tweak the genes of the food we eat without suspicion,” Erskine added. “We can pick and choose the naturally mutated ones until a blade of grass is a great ear of corn, but we can’t do it with purpose. Vic had dozens of examples like these. He rattled them off in the cafeteria that day.” Erskine ticked his fingers as he counted. “Vaccines versus natural immunities, cloning versus twins, modified foods. Or course he was perfectly right. The bastard always was. It was the manmade part that would have caused the chaos. It would be knowing that people were out to get us, that there was danger in the air we breathed.”

Erskine paused for a moment. Donald’s mind was racing.

“You know, Vic once said that if these terrorists had an ounce of sense, they would’ve simply announced what they were working on and then sat back to watch things burn on their own. He said that’s all it would take, us knowing that it was happening, that the end of any of us could come silent, invisible, and any damn time.”

“And so the solution was to burn it all to the ground ourselves?” Donald ran his hands through his hair, trying to make sense of it all. His teeth began to clatter. He thought of a firefighting technique that always seemed just as confusing to him, the burning of wide swaths of forest to prevent a fire from spreading. And he knew in Iran, when oil wells were set ablaze during the first war, that sometimes the only cure was to set off a bomb, to fight the inferno with something greater.

“Believe me,” Erskine said, “I came up with my own complaints. Endless complaints. But I knew the truth from the beginning, it just took me a while to accept it. Thurman was won over more easily. He saw at once that we needed to get off this ball of rock, to start over. But the cost of travel was too great.”

“Why travel through space?” Donald said, “when you can travel through time?” He remembered a conversation in Thurman’s office about making room on this planet rather than going off in search of another. The old man had told him what he was planning that very first day.

Erskine’s eyes widened. “Yes. That was his argument. He’d seen enough war, I suppose. Me, I didn’t have Thurman’s experiences or the professional… distance Vic enjoyed. It was the analogy of the computer virus that wore me down, seeing these nanos like a new cyber war. I knew what they could do, how fast they could restructure themselves, evolve, if you will. We could’ve gone back and forth for ages, but there would’ve been no end to it. Once it started, it would only stop when we were no longer around. And maybe not even then. Every defense would become a blueprint for the next attack. The air would choke with our invisible armies. There would be great clouds of them, mutating and fighting without need of a host. And once the public saw this and knew…” he left the sentence unfinished.

“Hysteria,” Donald muttered.

“Hysteria and homebrew. If you think affordable DNA sequencers were a scare, or those cloning kits that made the rounds, imagine kids programming nanos in their basements, sharing their designs on the web. It would