Unless he was lying, and she knew he was. She felt like a normal human being, and dupes always had something wrong with them. She hurried around a corner and stepped into an alley so she wouldn’t be seen by Swoboda if he came out. She leaned against a wall, the bricks still warm from the setting sun. She worked downtown, and its streets and alleys had always felt familiar and safe, but now … She had to talk to Papa.
She sent him a message. “Urgent. We need to talk. Right away.”
And she wanted to get home, to calm down. A bike—yes, she could find a bike, work off some energy, and get away.
Papa hadn’t answered by the time she stashed the bike and walked through the humid twilight to her apartment building.
Two of her three roommates were home when she arrived, eating as they stared at their phone displays. One looked up from her rice and beans.
“Oh, hi, B.” Her expression changed. “Rough day? Still hurting about your mom?”
“Yeah.” That seemed like the easiest explanation. She had good roommates—but would they want to live with a dupe? If clones weren’t physically handicapped, they were morally deficient, unnatural, and soulless. It would be like living with a known thief, and if the mutiny changed the law, it wouldn’t change minds about the things that everyone knew.
She hadn’t eaten, but she wasn’t hungry, just exhausted, or something that felt like exhaustion. “I’m going to bed.” She put on pajamas and climbed into her bunk, but she didn’t sleep. She watched a stupid movie for a long time.
Papa didn’t answer. Maybe he was busy putting on a show. Or distracted. Or off on some drug trip, or sleeping it off. Maybe Papa would help her, but she couldn’t count on that. What else could she do to prove that she wasn’t a dupe?
I had no choice, either as Dr. Li or secretly as Peng, no access to that easily pronounced word of one simple syllable: no. If I had refused, uttering that word would have been more irresponsible than any other error in my life, and I’d made more than enough already.
The soldier who had been waiting for me when I left the train station on my way home from work escorted me (with exquisite politeness) into the back of a windowless white van. It was driven to someplace near an airport, judging by the sounds—but not O’Hare, far too few flights. I disembarked in an underground parking area of a building, probably smallish, since there were a limited number of parking spots. Once inside, a colonel named Wilkinson sat across from me at a table in a meeting room, greeted me (also with exquisite politeness), and explained:
I would be working for the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. “I’ve heard of it,” I said. It researched countermeasures against biological warfare, and it had a reputation for responsibility and rigor. I could only hope that it was true.
“Our concern, Dr. Li,” he said, “is a vaccine.”
I remembered the blood delivered to the lab that day. “Against the deltacoronavirus cold?”
“Yes. You spotted that.”
“It would be a common approach to create an attenuated virus as a vaccine.”
“We’re thinking of something slightly different. Something self-administering.”
For a moment I was confused. Then I was appalled. He meant to create an attenuated virus that would not be administered as a normal vaccine—by injection, for example. Instead, this one would be set loose to spread from person to person through direct contagion. No one had ever tried that before successfully.
He noticed my reaction. “We need to act quickly because we can be certain the virus will be here in the United States within a week, maybe a lot sooner. In all honesty, China has done its best with containment and has done well, and it’s destined to fail. We’re aiming for a version of the virus that’s highly contagious but causes no harm to the host.”
That was exactly what had appalled me. “It will be hard to do. The does-no-harm part, especially.” The virus in the blood samples I’d seen back in the lab hadn’t seemed contagious but would have made the hosts very ill, as I’d reported. (What had happened to the people infected by that virus?)
“We don’t have time for test subjects.”
I felt a little light-headed, and not without cause. Fainting would be one way to flee a looming disaster. “That causes more difficulties.” That was unspeakably unethical, even in times of emergency, as he was well aware.
He nodded. “We know you can read, so to speak, genetic material, especially for human beings.” He paused, then added, “We’ll inform your employer that you’ll be working for us for a little while. By law, there can be no effect on your employment. You’ll be paid through them for your time. I needn’t mention that this project is of the highest secrecy. You have special clearance.”
Declining was not an option, and I understood the government’s need to commandeer expertise. A mistake in the design could be even worse than the disaster of the actual delta cold, but a perfect design would save billions of lives. Here I was, Peng, creator of life, cornered and trapped. Here was my chance to be an unsung hero. They must have been desperate to want to hire me, but they obviously knew of my extraordinary work.
“I agree.” Hubris, thy name is Peng. I had to sign a lengthy contract that held the United States government and all its agencies harmless from liability for every imaginable unfortunate occurrence. It held me responsible for everything but inclement weather. They allowed me to contact a friend to ask him to care for my pet bird in my absence, which I described to him as a sudden work-related trip.
I was led down the hall to my new office. I had a comfortable chair, a big L-shaped desk, five screens, a keyboard, a graphics pad, and two dictation microphones, but no windows to
