“What makes you say that?” she asked. She asked it like she wasn’t sure she believed him, but Ai had said the same thing to us. We’d figured out that no one ever saw anything that occurred after their lifetime—that’s what made that big, blank spot so scary—but aside from that, it did mean that one way or another, time was running out.
“You think we can still change this thing?” he asked over his shoulder. “That one day, something we do will make that big, empty space light up like the rest of the map, and the bright spot fade away?”
“That’s the point, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes ma’am. That’s the point.”
I was worried before, but now he had me really worried. I’d never heard him like that before. He usually got on my back for talking like that; he was more of a winat-all-costs kind of guy. He didn’t like what he called my defeatist attitude.
“Does this mean you weren’t able to make the virus work?” I asked.
Everyone knew by now that Fawkes had stolen Heinlein Industries’ prototype revivor model, Huma, three years back, and that he’d been using it ever since. No one really believed we’d ever find all the people infected with the Huma prototype before Fawkes finally activated them. The virus was somehow supposed to get on to their network and shut all of those infected back down again once they all came back to life. Test subjects were hard to find, though, and with them all still inactive, it was slow going. Sometimes I wondered if they’d be able to pull it off at all, but the more time that passed, the more hope was pinned on that solution. If the virus didn’t work, we were in big trouble.
“It works,” he said.
“Then—”
“Cell phones and other personal electronics off, please,” he said. We were standing at an unmarked door with a badge scanner mounted next to it.
“Is this it?” Penny asked.
“Yes.”
We shut off our gadgets, and Osterhagen waved his badge at the scanner, which turned green and made a heavy bolt pop behind the thick metal. He opened it and waved us inside.
The lab wasn’t anything like what I expected, and from the look on Penny’s face, it seemed like she felt the same way. I thought there would be rows and rows of computer equipment and guys in white lab coats, but mostly I thought I’d see revivors. I expected to see lots of them, but I didn’t see any. The scientists, if that’s what they were, looked more like soldiers, and none of them wore white lab coats. They all worked behind thick, clear plastic sheets that hung from the ceiling, and they all had on hazmat suits. They walked up and down metal walkways where heavy metal hatches were fixed to the wall. Each hatch had a thick panel of glass in the middle so you could see in, but all I saw was darkness.
I thought it would be sterile and high-tech, but it was dirty and looked more like a prison than a lab. I could see dried blood spatter on some of the plastic sheeting. The air smelled a little like rot.
“There are an estimated ten to eleven thousand carriers of the Huma prototype out there right now,” Osterhagen said. “We’ve managed to find less than four hundred of them, in a little over three years. That’s using aggressive tactics.”
“He has a limited supply of the proto—” Penny began.
“That’s an assumption,” he said, cutting her off. “We can’t afford to make that assumption here. Here, we have to prepare for the worst-case scenario, and even if the carriers number half of what we estimate, the amount of carnage those things will be able to cause is not something you could imagine, I don’t think.”
“I don’t have to imagine it,” I said. “I’ve seen it, remember?”
He signaled, and two of the soldier-scientists approached one of the hatches, each one flashing their badge at a separate scanner. LEDs on the scanners lit up green as something thudded through the floor, and I saw a black man’s hand, fingers splayed wide, press against the glass port in the door. It left a streak of something greasy and brown as it pawed at the smooth surface.
“What you’re going to see is a demonstration of the virus,” Osterhagen said. “I want you to see it for yourselves so you can let Ai know what you saw.”
The soldiers opened the hatch, and one of them stuck a cattle prod through the opening. Sparks lit up the inside and threw shadows of a body as it jerked and fell to the floor. Two more men dragged a dirty, naked man out from inside and hauled him up between them. His head lolled against a thick leather collar around his neck. The front of the collar had a heavy metal ring attached.
His toes dragged on the floor behind him as they carried him to a metal post that was about two feet high and dropped him in front of it. The one with the cattle prod came back and used a short chain to hitch the man’s collar to the post. A few rows down, more soldiers dragged out three more captives, two women and one man. All of their bodies were covered in bruises, mostly down the front of them.
“That’s lividity,” Osterhagen said offhand, “in case you were wondering.”
I wasn’t. They chained up the other three to posts facing the first one. I counted more than twenty posts total.
“In order for the nodes to form, death has to occur,” he said. “Huma stays dormant in a living system and doesn’t begin to initialize until after death. Once the reanimation is complete, they join a common network. They also join a command network, if one exists. Currently one doesn’t, but that’s okay. The full-mesh connection between them is the one we want.”
I remembered hearing some of what he said before. That’s part of what made the new revivors different from the old ones; the old ones had command connections back to whoever was controlling them, but not to each other. The new ones all had a connection to every other one, plus the control connection. I wasn’t completely sure why that was important, but as long as this worked, I didn’t care.
“Subjects secured,” a voice said over the intercom.
“Roger that,” another voice answered. “Implanting virus.”
“Transfer successful.”
A big screen lit up along the far wall down where the soldiers were, and a countdown started to tick off from twenty-one seconds.
“It takes twenty-one seconds for the virus to initialize and spread,” Osterhagen said.
“That’s kind of a long time,” Penny said. It didn’t sound like very long to me, but the general nodded.
“Too long. We need to get it down.”
The timer fell to zero, and then, just like that, all four of the test subjects went facedown against the metal posts they were chained to. None of them moved.
“Test complete,” a voice said.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it,” the general said. “The engineering behind this was massive, even with Heinlein’s help. But at the end of the day, yes, that’s it. The virus was implanted in the single subject by accessing its communication node, then spread to the others on its network, causing full shutdown of all four subjects.”
I looked down through the window as soldiers approached the bodies. I saw one of them stick a big needle into the back of the first subject’s neck, and check something on a small screen.
“Complete deanimation in all subjects,” a voice said. “Test successful.”
“If we didn’t keep them isolated,” Osterhagen said, “that would have shut every last one of them down.”
“That’s …good, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Twenty seconds is still too long,” he said. “When Fawkes makes his move, he’ll have a command spoke in place to each one of them. When there’s this big an intrusion into the systems of any one of them, he’ll get an alert for sure. Twenty seconds is more than long enough for him to cut the source of the virus off the network.”
“How long has this been ready?” Penny asked.
“We got a confirmed reaction four months ago. In another four, if we get four, we’ll have the init time down low enough that even Fawkes won’t be able to react fast enough.”
“That’s …good, then, isn’t it?” I asked again. It sounded like he was saying all he had to do was put the virus in any one of the carriers and he’d wipe out Fawkes’s whole army. He only needed one, and he had hundreds of them.
“No,” he said. “That’s what you need to tell Ai.”
