Viral

there for a while, in the nation of Mancala, and Anna was coming with him. They were going to oversee water projects, digging wells and irrigation latrines. Nadra Nkosi would run the operation. A project supported by an “anonymous donor.” They had close to $2 billion to spend on it. It was what Landon Pine had wished in his Last Will and Testament, left behind among his hand-written papers. A small attempt, perhaps, to make up for what he had done.

It was a step, that was all. To help “replace a culture of poverty and hopelessness with a culture of achievement and opportunity,” as Pine had written. Charles Mallory knew it could be done, but that it came down to a commitment of will and resources. A nation that could send a spacecraft to measure the atmosphere of Jupiter had the ingenuity to fix the problems of Africa. It just wasn’t trying hard enough.

Charlie closed his eyes. His father’s story was over now.

But reality, he knew, was stingy with certainties. Charles Mallory had learned that long ago. He also knew that what had gotten inside of Perry Gardner had also spread to other very smart and ambitious people. Even if it lay dormant now, it was possible that one day it would find the perfect host. And then, perhaps, the wheel of history would turn.

Expectations. Begin with that. What if the accepted version of things has another story attached to it. Something not expected. A story on the other side, the side that people don’t see, because they don’t have any reason to turn it over. You understand that. An old story retold throughout history, in different ways. Innate urges to dominate and to control. The examples are sometimes so far from what we expect human nature to be that we cast the perpetrators as monsters. Madmen. Hitler’s dream of a new Reich; the Islamist fundamentalists’ dream of a new caliphate; Mussolini’s dream of a new Roman Empire. Before they were simply mad, though, they were dreams that seized people’s hopes and raised their expectations. For some people, they briefly provided a shared, heightened existence. Most mad dreams don’t become realities, or even become known. Most are more subtle. A story hidden behind another story, sometimes. Suppose you let the madman in to clean up and no one knows that he is the madman. Begin with that. Afterward, regardless of what happened, we would adjust again and create a different set of expectations, and assumptions. We would adapt if we had to, because that is our nature. That is what we do. And in retrospect, we might even have a better, more civilized world because of it. Just suppose.

Nearly seven thousand three hundred miles away, Dr. Sandra Oku ended her day much as she had started it: she kneeled on the ground, clasped her hands together and she began to pray.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Laura Gross for her unflagging belief. Thanks to Juliet Grames and Bronwen Hruska at Soho Press for taking this on and for their invaluable help in shaping the final result. And thanks also to Janet, for being there.

Copyright

Copyright © 2012 by James Lilliefors

Published by

Soho Press, Inc.

853 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lilliefors, Jim

Viral / James Lilliefors.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-61695-069-9

1. Virus diseases—Fiction.  I. Title.

PS3562.I4573V57 2012

813?.54—dc23

2011050708

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