Immortality (12 page)

“You’re a medical doctor,” said Major Garvey. “You cure people. There’s another side to medical science; one I am more familiar with than you are. I’ve seen what renegade countries have engineered to kill on a mass scale. There are weaponized strains of Hemorrhagic Fever that can wipe out a city in 24 hours. I can easily imagine an engineered bug that could cause what’s happened in Anchorage.”

The Major paused to speak with someone on his end. Kathy heard muffled voices. He came back on the line and continued where he’d left off. “Four hours after the Anchorage incident, the Army had a dozen monitoring teams set up around the perimeter of the harbor. These teams have the best equipment. They can pick up a change in air chemistry from someone opening a bottle of chlorine bleach miles away. The equipment is designed to sniff out traces of chemical weapons up to a hundred miles from the battlefield. If this incident was caused by a chemical agent, our equipment would have picked up traces of it by now and it hasn’t.”

“So you’re convinced we’re dealing with a biological weapon?” said Kathy. “What if the chemical agent is something totally new, something your equipment’s not calibrated to detect?”

“I never said it was a biological weapon. I said a bug could have caused what happened at Anchorage, a naturally occurring microbe of a type yet unidentified.”

The Major was ignoring the interesting part of her question and getting defensive about the term ‘biological weapon.’ Kathy wondered what that meant. Carl’s secretary poked her head into Kathy’s office. She apologetically walked in, dropped a green slip of paper on her desk, and then disappeared. The slip was a phone message. The call Kathy had been waiting for was on another line: the survivor, Harold N.

Kathy was pacing back and forth in a fifteen-foot trail that led from her bookcase to her couch. Her knee was starting to feel raw. She ignored it. Her phone conversation with Harold N. had been the strangest of her career. Before the survivor had been put on the line, she had been informed that the conversation would be monitored and recorded. She was limited to pre-approved topics. Any deviation and the phone call would be terminated, no second chances. The lone witness’s description of what had happened had left her dizzy. The killer-agent was far more potent than she’d originally understood. Most the dockworkers had died in less than a minute. If broader exposure occurred, this thing could take out thousands of people in the blink of an eye. And who would survive? Who would be the next Harold, and why? For the first time in a very long while, Kathy felt completely inadequate for the job.

She stopped pacing and slumped down into her chair. She opened a computer window that displayed an enhanced view of the microscopic cuts. She had to find a new direction to approach this problem. What she was doing right now wasn’t working. So far, all she had was unexplainable microscopic nerve damage and heavy immune system reactions to nothing that could be identified. The bodies of the victims had apparently responded to the attack with every possible biological defense and been soundly trounced in less than a minute.

The samples from Harold N. would be arriving in less than an hour. She had no idea what to do, except run the same tests that were performed on the victims and look for discrepancies. Where were the great insights she’d had years ago when working as an EIS agent? Where was the innovation she’d shown in her work on immune system reactions? Maybe the Army was right in keeping Harold N. to themselves? They were probably more qualified....

~

Kathy was stunned by the Army’s postmortem report. She’d read it twice from beginning to end and still couldn’t believe it. Chromatium Omri had been found in the bodies of eighty-nine of the Anchorage victims. Frozen samples of Chromatium taken from each of the bodies were on their way to the CDC, courtesy of the U.S. Army. Thanks to Carl’s stubbornness on the issue, all the South American victims had been double checked days ago. No Chromatium had been found. There was no reason to run the tests a third time. The inconsistency between the South American and Alaskan finding didn’t make sense, but she could not ignore the numbers. Eighty-nine out of a hundred-six victims of the Anchorage kill zone had small unexplainable infestations of Chromatium Omri. Apparently the Chromatium had been found in isolated pockets, either in water that had been frozen on the face of the victims or in epidermal capillaries of skull and facial tissues. The numbers of bacteria were small and they were not distributed through the body, which suggested this was not a pathogenic contagion.

Kathy now had two unexplainable things that had to be connected in some way; Microscopic nerve cuts and Chromatium. She was miserable. If she hadn’t been so obstinate, so set against looking into Chromatium, they might have found something useful by now. She might have even found the answer, and hundreds of people that were dead might still be alive. Carl had been right and she had been fatally wrong. What else had she been wrong about?

~

Every surface of the ready-room was hospital white. Kathy was donning the protective clothing worn inside the BVMC lab. The containment suits were made by the same manufacturer that supplied NASA with space suits. The gear was in fact similar to equipment used by astronauts. Kathy pulled up a large plastic zipper that sealed the torso-section of her suit. The zipper had an oversized grip on the slider and a tongue-in-groove seal that could withstand a thousand pounds of pressure before separating. The material of the suit itself was completely impervious to liquids and gases. This airtight quality made the rig uncomfortable because of rapid buildup of perspiration. Unlike the astronauts’ model, the cooling system for the lab’s model was limited to simple air circulation; the weight and cost of a refrigeration unit made that luxury impractical. To partially compensate, the room temperature of the lab was kept at sixty degrees. Lab techs worked on three-hour rotating shifts in the BVMC lab. The reason for the short work period was discomfort and realization that accidents occurred when workers were distracted.

Kathy tucked her hair up in a net, then pulled on a helmet. The glass visor was off-center as she jockeyed the helmet back and forth, until it rested in the metal groove of the suit’s collar. She then fastened a pair of clamping levers and switched on the system to perform a pre-check for leaks. There was a hissing sound as the suit pressurized. The suit was completely self-contained with an air supply good for a maximum of four hours. The extended breathing time was accomplished by mixing bottled air with exhaled breath that had been scrubbed of carbon dioxide by a re-breather system. To achieve the high containment levels of the BVMC lab, the suits could not use external air supplies and hoses. At level four facilities, workers were connected by air hoses to spigots inside the lab. This allowed extended time in the lab, but it also meant that extremely small amounts of airborne contaminants which had come to rest on hose connections and spigots could be vented into a suit during hookup to an air supply. Even the most restrictive air filters on suit inlets were not considered safe enough for the BVMC lab.

While Kathy had been suiting up, the first and second stage airlocks were cycling to a condition where the automatic safeties would allow the entry door to open. Both airlock stages were currently flooded to the ceiling with Zydex, a chemical sterilization solution developed for the military. The blue colored solution was a witch’s brew of highly activated sterilization agents which could kill any living substance on contact. The only problem with Zydex was that if not neutralized in about an hour, it would start to eat away at an entire host of materials. Before cycling to allow entry, both airlocks were flooded with Zydex solution for twenty minutes and then drained and refilled with a bath of neutralizer.

Two airlocks were used in series to reduce the possibility of contamination caused by seal failure or other door malfunctions. In addition to multiple airlock stages, the containment lab operated one quarter below normal atmospheric pressure to prevent contaminants from escaping in the unlikely possibility that all other safety measures failed. The first stage airlock would be pumped down an eighth in air pressure from the outside before the middle door would open. The second stage airlock would be brought down another eighth before the door to the lab would open. The entire process of entering took thirty minutes; exiting took forty. During entry, in each of the two stages, occupants were drenched in high pressure sprays of Zydex and then neutralizer. A shower of sterilized water followed each chemical treatment to wash off any remaining neutralized Zydex. The sprays of sterilization liquid, neutralizer, and rinse came at the occupants from every direction, out of thousands of jets that were mounted in the floor, ceiling, doors, and walls of the airlocks. Once each cycle completed, the hatch safeties leading to the next stage would release. Exiting the lab took longer than entry; instead of spray-downs, lab workers were sealed in each airlock stage as its high pressure sprays completely filled the chambers, effectively immersing workers in Zydex sterilization baths. Whether exiting or entering, workers emerged from the airlocks a little disoriented and drenched in sterilized water. Just outside each entry hatch in the lab and in the ready-room were drying stalls where a set of warm air blowers and vacuums whisked off all dampness.

Kathy sat down on a bench and waited as the suit’s automated pre-check continued. The ready-room always reminded her of a whitewashed locker room, except for one thing: the entranceway. From the outside, the ready room was a vault identical to that used in a bank. Both a magnetic badge and a numeric pass code were required to open it. Security was the sole concern of one tenth of the entire BVMC staff. Some days, it seemed there were guards at every doorway and television cameras in every closet. The hallways leading to the BVMC lab were monitored by cameras every twenty feet. There was no possibility of even a cockroach sneaking by.

Kathy tried to stretch her legs. She was already getting stiff inside the suit. The pre-check finished with a series of beeps which indicated all systems passed their self-tests. She glanced at the air supply gauge on her wrist. The gauge was like a digital stopwatch running backwards. Her reason for being here was the package from Alaska, and it was due to arrive any minute. The airlocks had completed their cycle. A green light above a numeric entry pad indicated she could enter. She felt perspiration dotting her forehead. She tried to think of other things while she waited.

Kathy looked up to the sound of metal bolts sliding into their receivers and then a faint hiss, as the vault door slid open. Two men in military uniforms entered. One of the men was carrying a metal container that looked like a cross between a small ice chest and a safe. Inside it were the Chromatium samples from the victims of the Alaska kill zone.

After what felt like an endless spray of toxic liquid, the final stage airlock door opened with the whir of electric motors. Kathy stepped over the foot high threshold into the lab. The flooring by the door was a steel drainage grate which continued as a walkway to a set of drying stalls. High power UV sterilization lights glowed partially out of sight beneath the grate. There were times when entering the lab felt like she was stepping onto the surface of the moon. This was one of those times. In the lab, she was more completely separated from the world than anywhere else on the planet. The unspoken fact was if accidents occurred, those trapped in the lab handled it themselves or died. As far as help was concerned, they may as well have been on the moon.

Kathy was aware of the hiss of bottled air being released with each of her inward breaths. This was something she normally did not notice. She set the metal container down on a lab bench and unlocked it. Inside, immersed in a super-chilled bath of concentrated hypochlorite solution was a rack of sealed specimen pipettes. Each glass pipette was the size of a thin bar straw sealed on both ends. The hypochlorite was there to kill anything dangerous if the container or the pipettes broke in transit. Using a pair of tongs, she removed the rack from its hypochlorite bath. She kept one of the pipettes and placed the rest in a cryogenic freezer.

Two of the lab techs, Alan and Claire, were setting up equipment to run high speed comparisons of key DNA sequences from this new sample versus live Chromatium from the Rochester colony. Kathy placed her pipette inside a glove box. The glove box was like a large glass aquarium, roughly four feet square with a door in the front and oversized sealed rubber gloves that passed through to the inside. She lowered the door, set the controls to recirculate, then switched the glove box on. A ventilator began to purify the air inside the box, one of many precautions used to lower the chance of airborne microbes contaminating a specimen.

Kathy took longer than normal to prepare a sample for the TEM. She was working carefully to avoid all sources of contamination. During the entire procedure, she kept feeling that this held the answer, that her fingers were touching something that would save lives. The feeling was irrational. There was no logical reason why she would find any answers now. Her mind was working on theories. Maybe Chromatium was the carrier and not the killer. A mosquito borne illness suggested last week by the DTAVAS computer program might not have been so crazy after all. Maybe the killer was a virus or something else living inside the Chromatium? She barely noticed when Alan came over to collect the remainder of sample she had been using. She was so anxious that her hand was shaking as she inserted the first carrier into the electron microscope.

The computer screen was the same high resolution model as the one in her office. She set the TEM at one thousand diameters and began searching for Chromatium by programming the system to slowly move the sample in widening circles ranging out from the center. She hit the pause button when several bacteria came into view. She centered the best specimen and upped the magnification. The cross-section of Chromatium grew to fill the screen. The bacterium was approximately the same size as a human blood cell. The specimen had been dead for twenty-four hours and was slightly misshapen from pressure damage. It no longer appeared as a perfect capsule shape; it was mildly shriveled as if it was a tube balloon that had lost too much air.