Speaking into my ear as she pushed, the doctor said, 'Lulu, I'm going to confide something to you now that you're going to find hard to believe, but which I think will help you understand your role here. Would it surprise you to hear that Agent X was man-made?'
I couldn't honestly say I was surprised. We had talked about it often enough on the boat-that the whole thing was probably the result of germ warfare or bioterrorism or some stupid lab accident. So what? I thought bitterly. What the hell difference did it make now?
'I told you before that Mogul was a boys' club,' she said. 'An extremely exclusive boys' club. Its purpose was to preserve the perquisites of great wealth for its members. What do you suppose is the biggest obstacle to their continued wealth and power, the thing that galls them above everything else?'
'Agent X, obviously.'
'No. This is something that's been around much longer. Caesars and pharaohs have tried to get around it since the beginning of time, creating religious empires and anointing themselves gods, but in this matter there's never been any real difference between a king and the average jerk in the street.'
'Death?' I scoffed.
'Yes, death, of course. Death and taxes. Doesn't it make sense that these tycoons would do what they could to erect a tax shelter? That's what Mogul is. It was discreetly founded to pursue so-called 'life-extension technologies.''
I would have laughed if I hadn't been so miserable. 'Oh, right.'
'It's true.'
'When did all this begin?'
'Back in the eighties.'
'And somehow this never made the news?'
'It wasn't a publicly traded company. Just an obscure private research foundation doing longevity studies. They were a dime a dozen.'
'So Agent X was supposed to be some kind of Fountain of Youth?'
'We've always tried to avoid the stigma of putting it in quite those words, but yes.'
'And you were part of it, I suppose?'
'Every doctor here was part of it. I had been doing proteome work for Brown University when I was approached by a man named Uri Miska. He was a Nobel Laureate for his work on the AIDS vaccine, and he came to me with a very interesting proposal involving synthetic DNA. Have you ever heard of something called the Mandelbrot Set?' I shrugged, and she said, 'It's a simple mathematical equation-z equals z squared plus c-which produces a fractal structure of infinite complexity. Here, this is what it looks like.'
She showed me her laminated ID card, which hung by an alligator clamp from her smock. On the reverse side was an outline of a kidney shape fused to a sphere, with crystalline fronds sprouting from all sides. It resembled a weird snow-flake or a fuzzy seated Buddha.
'You can't tell from this,' she said, 'but if you could zoom in on any part of this structure, you would find that it expands into an endless series of organic patterns, seemingly random, but all incorporating smaller and smaller versions of this same basic shape, literally to infinity. Do you know what it is you're looking at, Lulu?'
'Not really.'
'It's the face of God.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'This is how nature stores information. This is how DNA molecules with only four basic nucleotides-adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine-can contain all the incredible diversity of life. Not just human life, but all life. Miska realized that if we could harness this information-carrying capacity, we could revolutionize… well, you name it. An infinitely small computer with infinitely large storage capacity? Can you imagine? So we started creating our own Mandelbrot Set, our own self-perpetuating equation, not with figures but with organic molecules. In effect, blank DNA. Writable DNA.'
We were approaching an archway in the dome wall. It funneled down to an air-lock door like the one we had encountered outside. Dr. Langhorne rolled me in, and as the pressure equalized very slightly, I asked, 'Are you telling me that was Agent X?'
'Not quite. But we used it to create a very interesting thing: a rudimentary organism with some of the desirable properties of a stem cell, only far more robust, like a prion. We called it our 'Magic Bean.' It could replicate itself and incorporate its genetic matrix into other cells.'
'A virus, you mean.'
'Kind of, except that instead of killing the cells, it streamlined them, radically simplifying the metabolic processes and turning each cell into an independent unit within the whole. The body as colony organism, analogous, I suppose, to a jellyfish. Strictly speaking, the host was no longer human, or even alive as we know it, but it was far more efficient and resilient. The organic structure remained, but it was arbitrary-a bag of obsolete parts governed by a solid-state master. Think analog to digital.'
Listening to her talk, I wondered if this woman had ever seen a Xombie. Had she ever run for dear life, with blue hands clawing at her back? Had she ever seen a loved one transformed into a demonic predator? 'You make it sound like an upgrade,' I said.
'It was supposed to be. You have to look objectively at what we accomplished-don't think of the hosts as monsters, but as an interim stage of our evolution. Because that's what it is: an evolutionary leap, a transformation to another state of being, just as when Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons shared the Earth. Change is always scary, but our fear comes from ignorance. We can outgrow it and learn to understand.'
Understand what? I thought. 'Didn't Neanderthals go extinct?'
We passed through the air lock, and she wheeled me into a separate dome, one that was smaller, emptier, and far less colorful than the first, but just as impressive in its own right, being all unobstructed open space. They could have held a monster truck rally in there. It looked like it was still under construction, with aluminum catwalks crisscrossing a tread-marked field of gray mud, and prefabricated sheds clustered among boulders in a fenced compound in the center. All around the periphery a deep trench had been excavated to drain the thawing permafrost, and we paused at the edge of the moat.
'Why are you telling me all this?' I asked.
'Because you're going to be challenged to overcome your prejudice and see this for what it is.'
'I've seen it. I've been out there. Have you?'
'What you've seen is only half the picture. It's more complex than that.'
'Oh, well, I'm glad there's more to it than just the human race being wiped out. What the hell happened?'
'There were fail-safes to prevent the lab strains from being infectious, even if they got loose. We had configured them to form a chemical bond with anoxic hemoglobin, but it was much, much weaker than the normal oxygen bond, so the effects would be neutralized in the presence of air. Pure oxygen swept it away like a magic wand. What we failed to anticipate was how long the inert organism could remain infectious, its longer-term mutagenic properties, and that it could colonize iron, forming a fast-spreading blue anaerobic rust. These X factors allowed our 'Magic Bean' to take root and multiply in all kinds of hard-to-reach places, away from the air-inside vacuum-sealed containers and liquid-filled tanks, in plumbing and wiring and soil-eventually saturating the environment. It went worldwide before anyone even noticed.'
'Hard-to-reach places. Oh my God.' I winced as a million-watt lightbulb exploded in my brain. 'You mean like the uterus. That's how it got into women-through the uterus. During their cycles.'
'Yes,' she said, studying me. 'Boy, they weren't lying about you. The uterus was an ideal incubator, I'm sorry to say.'
Across the trench an Erector-Set drawbridge jerked to life, spanning the mucky green water.
I watched it move, suddenly conscious of how real it was. The grinding motor, the stadium lights, the mud. This was all real. But it couldn't be, it couldn't be! Light-headed, I tried to ground myself by asking, 'What caused all the women to change at once?'
'The organism reached the end of its shelf life. That was another safeguard: a biological timer that expired on midnight of the new year. After that, its governing proteins were expected to become unstable and break down. Instead it… did something else. And the rest,' she said, 'is history. Okay, go on across-they'll meet you on the other side.' She ripped the Velcro bands off my wrists.
