“We face death in many ways,” I said.
“A new one every day.” She then entertained herself, but not me, by reciting some of the known pathogens threatening our health or food supplies. Her tasks during that shift included a sample of feces from sick pigs, and she would soon set about examining it.
Then three soil samples arrived by certified courier and were dropped off in the airlock to our clean room. Did the soil contain the fungus that was blighting bean crops in Mexico? Urgent question. I took some cultures. Common cloned strains of beans offered no resistance to this fungus. Evil genetic engineering and the evil nature of cloned crops (not irresponsible practices by profit-hungry corporate farms) had endangered the world’s food supply, and by extension, me and the children I had once genetically designed and cloned.
Rancor, thy name is Peng.
(Or the fungus could have been a targeted biological attack, but at what target? The answer was beyond my means to know, but recent turmoil had made me believe in its possibility. Rancor was always epidemic.)
As I was finishing the cultures, the cameras in the automated reception area showed a hazmat-clad courier dropping off a container marked with top-level biohazard warnings.
That was unusual.
“Received,” I said over the speakers. The courier waved and hurried out. The container cycled through the airlock into the clean room. I dropped what I was doing and opened it. Inside were ten vials of human blood. We were tasked to determine whether the bloods’ previous owners were infected with the Sino cold (a variety of delta-CoV, to be properly more technical—or better yet, Stone Age boar coronavirus).
I checked the instructions again, hoping I was mistaken.
“Who sent this?” my coworker demanded. Another very good question.
“The label gives randomized ID. Corporate knows exactly who. We’re not supposed to know.”
“I’ll let you handle those samples.” She noticed my eyes wrinkle from a wry smile behind my face mask. “Hey, I got kids.”
“Retirement can’t come soon enough for me.” I began the search for viral RNA in the blood, and if I didn’t find that cold, what would I find? Presumably the patients were ill from something awful.
By then, three hours had passed, and the chickens’ death had a cause. She looked at the report on the screen. “Avian infectious bronchitis, like you said.”
Another gammacoronavirus, a familiar foe. “Ah, but what variety? Databases want to know.”
I studied the output, then the raw data from the RNA bases. The program had compared strains and highlighted unexpected differences. “Oh, now this could be bad,” I said, master of the grammar of base pairs, seeing a potential death sentence in the wording. “Look right here.” A hologram screen created a three-dimensional representation of a protein. I rotated it. “Coronaviruses have a proofreading function, which is expressed here, and this variation isn’t in the databases. I don’t know how this segment would function. And I should.”
She gave me a side-eye. Perhaps I had said too much if I wished to remain incognito. Few people shared Peng’s skill in predicting genetic changes. Or perhaps she hadn’t wished to imagine that chickens or, worse, wild birds were coughing up mutant viruses all over Iowa.
“Then it’s a good thing those chickens are dead,” she said. “But take a look at this for bad. Parasites in the pig shit.”
I came to look. Her screen displayed an unmagnified sample that contained smooth, pale worms several centimeters long. They were twitching. I shuddered and looked at her other screen, which displayed a genetic breakdown of the contents.
“Nematodes,” I said.
“You sure?”
“I’ve seen them before.”
“I wish I had your memory.”
“I mean the worms, not the DNA.” But I lied.
“What kind?”
“The world has far too many nematodes. Perhaps Ascaris, given the size and location.”
And so they were, as she was able to confirm: big disgusting roundworms, living in pigs no less, not quite Ascaris suum or lumbricoides or anything else, so either we had a new species (for which we wouldn’t get naming rights), or a mutation (which was becoming far too common across all species for a long list of reasons), or some careless fool had been tinkering with the language of life (also distressingly common). Both pigs and humans, and perhaps other animals, could be at risk.
“How dangerous is this?” she asked.
“Veterinarians could tell us.”
After a moment, she said, “I wish they treated pig shit more responsibly on farms.”
Whatever this worm was, its propagation was only one easy mistake or minor disaster away from our drinking water.
“If a stable has burned down,” I murmured, remembering a quote attributed to Confucius, “do not ask about horses, ask about men.”
She looked at me.
“Worry about people, not animals,” I said.
“You got that right.”
By then the soil sample was ready. No fungus. (Yet. Sooner or later it would blow in on the wind.) We joyfully reported that.
She looked over my shoulder at the initial results from the blood samples. Delta-CoV had been isolated from six of the ten.
“Oh, no!” she said. “Not here!”
“They could have come from anywhere,” I said, knowing the samples were more than likely local. “And it matters which virus.”
“It’s delta,” she said like an accusation. Sino was a delta, and the only one of that genus that affected humans—so far as we knew.
“We can compare it to the Sino virus,” I offered.
She backed away, as if the virus could propagate through the screen. I worked rapt, finally able to see this monster up close. Yes, it was Sino—but no, it wasn’t. Not quite. My fingers grew cold from fear. I called up a model, then twisted and turned it and slowly grew both more and less frightened.
“Look,” I called out to her. “The neuraminidase is different. I don’t think it would be effective.” I pointed to a section of the enzyme.
“Effective at what?”
“I think the virions couldn’t get out of the cell to infect someone else.”
She gave me that side-eye again, uncertain
