Berenike thought for a moment. She hadn’t voted for that guy, but maybe he was okay. It really was a declaration of independence, a contingent one. She checked the activists’ network, and it was abuzz with demands for an outright declaration.
She didn’t have time for that debate. Don’t they have real work to do? I could give them a lot. Anyway, someone seemed to be trying to hijack a bus. Big mistake. God would punish sinners.
With access to the news, I soon learned that a far bigger mutiny than I’d hoped for was under way, as well as a backlash against the mutiny, in addition to an epidemic—all this must have been the earthquake I’d felt gathering two days earlier.
Despite the many urgencies, we could address only the epidemic, and that might be enough. A few of us met, face-to-face (finally), in Colonel Wilkinson’s office, a room graced with a family photo of a woman and a teenager in the corner of a bare shelf and no other personal possessions or decoration, as if he did not wish to claim ownership of the space or seek any comfort in his duties there.
“Do we know where the attenuated virus came from? The one that was released as a vaccine.” I asked. “It’s not ours.”
“That’s for the historians to worry about,” Node 6 said. “We have a job to do.”
“Yes,” Vita said. “How will these viruses interact?”
To my surprise and concern, Node 6 wasn’t military. (To no surprise, Node 1 was military—in fact a tag team of individuals.) Instead, Node 6 came from a corporate background, the exact kind of person to whom I had always imagined I was sending reports when I worked at the private laboratory, warning of discoveries that made me quake with fear: an impatient, profit-oriented executive who focused on financial reports, not laboratory reports. Tavis was his name—whether his first or last wasn’t made known to me (clearly not an artistic name), and neither was his exact corporate provenance. His sun-bleached blond hair, ruddy skin with a hint of freckles, and rugged build whispered of wealth because no one of modest means could spend that much time outdoors getting exercise.
I noticed that my question had been sidestepped. “I asked who made the virus, the one that was released, out of admiration.”
“Isn’t it just like the one that you and Dr. Peixoto designed?” Tavis said. He looked at her as if she understood a subtext. She showed no reaction, not even annoyance. Perhaps she knew too much, including why he wanted to avoid the answer. I hoped my observation was wrong, but my heart was plummeting.
“It’s almost like the one we designed,” I said. She had provided a lot of ideas for it. Had she known what was about to be released? Suddenly something made sense: If the Prez’s plan failed, someone would have to take the blame, and the guilt could be heaped on Peng, who was already an ignominious DNA tinkerer. (Was that paranoia? Again, I hoped so, but my heart continued to plummet.)
“So the attenuated virus that was released is even better,” Tavis said defensively.
“It’s meant to confer immunity,” I said, not answering his assertion. Retaliation felt sweet. “How quickly would immunity take effect?”
“Are you suggesting that…” began Node 4, a quick-witted woman named Professor Wicker. Her frown finished the sentence. Many vaccines took days, even weeks to produce antibodies. I’d already calculated that this viral vaccine, with its efficient design, would work immediately, but I wanted people to worry. No one besides myself had been sufficiently terrified throughout this entire process.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
“This will be an easy question to answer,” I said, “by examining people who’ve been infected. I think it should be the first question for deciding how the two viruses are interacting out in the wild.”
“We really need to know what’s happening,” Vita said.
I had other, more important questions, and the data would answer them, so I agreed wholeheartedly. The question of how they interacted mattered most immediately to our task of saving lives. Although I felt certain the attenuated virus, meant to be a vaccine, was working, I could be very wrong. We split up assignments and returned to our workstations, and I propped my door open with a wastebasket, a statement about my availability as much as about my need to be part of a real-life greater whole after too much solitary confinement.
Thus we began to examine data from live and dead human beings like Roman augurs scrutinizing the entrails of animals sacrificed to the gods: lung, nasal cavity, throat, sputum, and even a little blood—but unlike the Romans, we couldn’t keep sacrificing offerings until one gave us the answer we sought. Dum spiro, spero, the Romans had punned. While I breathe I hope. We needed to do our part to keep people breathing, and suddenly I thought of a fast, obvious shortcut to the complex research.
Avril struggled against the too-tight clamp on her arm as the centaur dragged her from the lake. She fought to regain her footing, but it pulled her too fast, and her legs banged into trees and rocks at the lakeshore. And through it all, she screamed.
“You killed Drew! I know there’s a human controlling this. Listen to me. People are dying, and you’re killing them. How can you do this?”
She suspected no one was actually listening. A centaur could be as autonomous as a car, just with better software and even better legal protections. If an autonomous police robot hurt or killed someone, by law no one was responsible. The murder wouldn’t matter.
She screamed
