“He had to upload some code to activate the thanites. They might have been mostly biological, but they still had enough machine in them that they needed a command to switch on. Ezra explained what was happening as he worked. Thanites had been released into the room with the subject. They floated through the air, being inhaled and expelled with every breath, but ultimately dormant. When activated, they would seek out a host. Their biological nature meant they needed to find a hospitable environment to survive—specifically, a human. They could enter the body through any mucous membrane, such as the eyes, throat, and lungs. They would be nearly painless. Ezra would allow them to work for several hours and had a second code lined up to deactivate the thanites before his neighbour was allowed out of the room. Then we would run tests to see whether any repairs had been made, and if so, how much.”
A shot of light came through the slats, thunder rolling after it. In that second of brightness, everything in the room had an unnatural appearance; the chairs, the discarded jackets, even Peter took on an otherworldly glow.
“We watched and waited. For the first minute, nothing seemed to happen. The little old Korean lady kept sitting there, smiling patiently. Then—” His voice choked as he stood. He crossed to the window and leaned against the sill, staring through the slats at the sky. When he turned to face them, his grin was resolutely back in place, but strained. “Well, you can probably guess. And I’m sure you could do without the details. But it didn’t go well. As soon as she started screaming, Ezra put in the deactivation code. Only, it didn’t work.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Peter pushed one of the window’s slats up with his finger and peered down at the street. His face twitched, and he dropped the slat back into place. “At the time, Ezra didn’t know what had gone wrong. But looking back, I have a pretty good guess. The earlier model of his thanites—the broken ones—had populated everywhere by that time. Including the air in the isolation chamber. Ezra had been feeding carbon and compounds into the room to grow the machines, without realising he was essentially populating two versions, one which was already present in high numbers. The termination code worked exactly as it was intended, but only on the latest strain. It did nothing for the rogue version.”
The rain had settled into a steady drumming pattern. Lightning bursts were frequent but distant. The crackling thunder blurred underneath Peter’s voice.
“As you can imagine, Ezra was frantic. He’d thought his thanites were harmless. Instead, he’d had to watch his subject—his friend—die in one of the most unpleasant ways imaginable. I was beside myself. Ezra kept pacing, swiping a tissue over his face to mop up sweat. It took us a while to compose ourselves enough to face what we’d done. It was a little after six by that point. Our morning-bird colleagues would be arriving in an hour. Ezra asked me to help him hide the body. But before we could open the chamber doors, I got a phone call from my sister.”
Dorran spoke, his voice so low that it barely disturbed the room’s stillness. It was the first time he’d addressed Peter directly. “You were going to hide the body?”
Peter turned away from the window, blinking rapidly. “Well. It was complicated. No matter how many precautions you take, it’s impossible to ensure complete safety in any kind of human trial. People do occasionally expire in the name of science. They’re made aware of the risk before signing up, as Ezra’s neighbour would have been. I know it sounds callous, but the reality is you have to endure occasional death in the pursuit of something that might save countless more lives.”
Dorran was so still that he could have been a statue. “A woman was dead. Murdered. And you would have hidden it.”
Clare blinked. “He’s right. That… that’s so…”
“Oh, no, no!” Peter held up his hands, chuckling. “I’m sorry, you misunderstood me. I didn’t mean hide her body as in hide it. Not like in a shallow grave or anything. I’m not a criminal. We were going to cover the observation room’s windows, so that our co-workers wouldn’t have to see it while we waited for the authorities to arrive.”
Clare managed to smile. “Right. I guess I let my imagination run away on me.”
“No, that’s understandable.” Peter came back to his seat and stood behind it, hands braced on its back. “Ezra wanted me to help him hide it from our colleagues. Can you imagine coming into work and seeing a woman with tumour-like growths across her face and hair pouring out of her mouth? It’s enough to give anyone nightmares. But we didn’t even get that far. My sister called me. She lived a couple of hours away. She’d heard the earliest news reports on her radio while walking her dog and wanted to make sure I was okay. And I turned to Ezra and asked him, ‘Are you sure it’s contained to the lab?’”
It was surreal to hear about the world’s end told from the perspective of one of the people behind it, and how the news had reached him from such a mundane avenue. Clare frowned. “But if it started here, wouldn’t you have known about it? There must have been screaming—”
“Not in this city. Not at that point. From when Ezra put out the activation code, it would take nearly three hours for the thanites in our area to respond. Because they work in tandem to come online, areas with the thickest population were more likely to activate sooner. The isolation chamber came on nearly immediately since Ezra had been feeding in fuel to artificially increase the numbers. Outside needed more time to respond. I think Beijing fell first, with New York thirty minutes later. It escalated from there.
“Ezra and I were relatively safe inside the
