Paradox (19 page)
Authors: A. J. Paquette
They start to communicate alarm:
And then there’s one that makes Ana’s heartbeat go into rapid fire:
AO as in Ana Ortez? She thinks about when Todd left her alone in the cave. And he must have found other moments as they traveled together to send in reports. She frowns, thinking
of at least one time when he was fiddling with his circlet while they were on the run.
Near the end of the string of messages she sees a series of frantic reports from Ysa:
Ana suddenly realizes something has been nagging at her about the messages: as she clicks on and reads each one, its color changes, going from a creamy pale to a darker, more vivid color.
Nearly half of the messages were unread.
Could it be that Bailey never saw the cries for help? The whole time they were running and fighting for their lives, the whole time Chen and Ysa were dying on some distant planet—and no one knew?
Yet she, Ana, made it back safely from this trip. How did that happen? Who sent her home?
Ana drops her forehead to the desk, forcing herself to breathe slowly in and out. The smell of blood and death fills her
nostrils, and her head spins. She needs to focus, and the most important thing she needs to figure out is what’s happening here
now
. The planet stuff, her travel, that can wait until later.
For now—why are people bleeding to death?
She thinks back to what she saw of Bailey’s experiences, inside those memory strands. There was talk of a sickness on Earth, some kind of disease that was spreading so fast no one was prepared for it. And now apparently the disease has spread and Bailey really is dead. She thinks of Bailey’s memory of her coworker Pat, thinks of the newscaster she saw, dead on live television.
Bailey and how many others?
Lifting her head again, Ana shuts down the ParaSim program, leaving the rest of the messages unread. She scans the rest of the icons on the desktop, wondering if there’s anything she’s missed, knowing there’s still vital information she doesn’t have.
What sickness
is
this?
And then she sees it: right in the center of the screen, the icon of a notebook page, topped by a small red flag. Whatever that is, the flag marks it as urgent. She remembers Bailey talking about a report she’d been working on, something she desperately needed to update. Could this be it?
Shifting her hands inside the console, Ana selects the icon and opens up the word processor. The page is topped with large red letters: URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL.
Hands shaking, Ana scrolls down and begins to read.
TO: Jackson R. Pritchett
FROM: Bailey Sinclair
SUBJ: Analysis of
Vermiletum-V:
Overview of Disorder and Newly Increased Infection Risk
Originally thought to be a containable disease,
Vermiletum
’s recent mutation shows an alarmingly high threat potential. The prion-based infection widely referred to by the public as a virus is in fact a malignant neurological disorder caused when normal proteins in the brain begin to misfold into mutated form.
Once triggered, these defective proteins, or prions, begin to affect the hippocampus, playing upon the storage and retrieval of long-term memories. Subsequently spreading to the amygdala, the infection appears to magnify memories associated with a strong fear response, simultaneously amplifying the brain’s electrical activity to hundreds of times its usual strength.
This amplified electrical activity appears responsible for
Vermiletum
’s highly unusual form of transmission. The amplification is so strong that the electrical pulse can reach out to infect nearby individuals, triggering the misfolding in new victims. Neural pathways are thus altered to the extent that these warped biochemical signals can be continually
broadcast out to infect new victims with absolutely no need for physical contact.
As the infection progresses, it activates fear centers in the brain, triggering a release of stress hormones and causing severe panic attacks. The disease inhibits the reuptake of these hormones, preventing them from being absorbed into the body and causing the attacks to continuously increase in length and scope. Other organ systems are subsequently affected, notably the circulatory system, which leads to hemorrhaging in the liver, lungs, and kidneys, resulting in eventual organ failure and finally death.
Because neural pathways in the infected are permanently altered, there has been much speculation in scientific journals that if the infection were successfully reversed in just one patient, that patient’s brain would continue to transmit a signal to those nearby, but the signal would shift from one that is warped and infection-creating to one that is balanced and infection-cleansing. The hope is that this would lead to a cascade effect, something like a reverse infection pattern. Unfortunately to date there has been no progress made in understanding how to reverse the infection.
In any event, any hopes for such efforts appear to come too late, as the disease has now morphed into a far more virulent strain,
Vermiletum-V
.
Documented cases of the new variant include a notably decreased incubation period, with first symptoms appearing within hours (rather than weeks) of infection, and strikingly amplified fear responses. The scope of contagion also seems highly accelerated, imprinting the infection in new victims through the most casual of cognitive contact.
Further study and immediate decisive action is necessary if we are to avoid a pandemic of unimaginable proportions.
Ana’s pulse is pounding in her ears as she slowly draws her hands out of the console pocket.
Vermiletum
. Just one word, and the cause of so much death and destruction. So that’s what happened to Bailey and … how many more?
She suddenly, desperately, needs to find someone else, anyone else who is still alive.
Ana jumps up and sprints through the cubicles toward the main door leading out of the office. She pushes through and looks up and down a bright white hallway. Which way? There’s a blinking light farther down the hall, and she follows it to an elevator, and a sign that says
FLOOR 16
.
Ana presses the call button, and after a moment the doors slide open. Stepping inside is like passing for one brief moment into another world, someplace normal, where everything is all right again.
The moment passes.
She pushes
G
for ground.
The walls of the elevator are mirrored. As the elevator descends, Ana stares at herself, at this wide-eyed, disheveled stranger until she finally can’t stand it anymore and turns away.
Stop
. She didn’t let herself cry for Bailey; she won’t cry for herself.
The doors slide open again, and Ana steps into a brightly lit foyer. It’s empty.
Ana’s heart starts up a slow, pounding rhythm. She walks across a plush red carpet to a tiled marble floor. Through a revolving glass door she can see the dark outside. Directly opposite the door is a massive mahogany desk, but no one is sitting at it. On one side of the desk is a smaller door marked
EMERGENCY EXIT;
on the door’s white paint is a bright red handprint.
Bailey’s blood-streaked face flashes through Ana’s mind. Ana turns away from the print, pushes through the revolving door, and steps out into the night.
A cold wind slams into her. She looks up and down the narrow street. It’s deserted, and though a row of cars is parked along one side, there’s nobody walking or driving nearby. Farther down the street Ana sees the glowing sign of a late-night café. Wrapping her arms tightly around herself, she starts down the sidewalk toward it. A flicker of movement in her peripheral vision catches her eye, and her heart leaps—but it’s just a sheet of newspaper blowing down the sidewalk.
Wait,
news
paper? Ana chases the paper down, grabs it out of the air, and scans the headlines:
Vermiletum
Death Toll Out of Control—Is this THE END?
Cover-up Suspected: How Long Has the Government Known?
Vaccine Rumors Prove Unfounded
It’s all about the disease, every article on the whole page, box after box, tiny print crammed across every inch of space, like maybe the editor knew this was the last paper that would ever be printed and wanted to fill it with everything that needed to be said.
One article in particular catches her eye:
The Germ That Destroyed the Earth
by Lauren Wong, Staff Writer
After the return of the ill-fated APEX2 expedition survivors nearly a year ago, it quickly became apparent that the epidemic of death on both APEX missions was caused by the neurological disorder now known as
Vermiletum
. Unofficial sources within Savitech believe the colonists disturbed a chemical compound in the soil of planet Cyclid-Bf, or Paradox; upon the APEX2 crew’s return to Earth, every adult colonist showed signs of infection. Despite much initial buzz on the apparent immunity of the minors who were part of the expedition, Savitech has remained mum on any resulting links or connections.
“It’s a kind of mind worm,” said Dr. Rick Paolo of the Global Infectious Disease Group (GIDG). “It anchors itself in the brain’s memory center and then spreads outward from there to the amygdala—the fear center of the brain—and from there to the rest of the body, ending in a kind of full-body hemorrhagic attack.”
No known methods of quarantine
have proven able to contain the infection. By the time it was understood that the contagion was spread by distorted brain signals, and could not be controlled by biohazard suits or disruptive barriers, the germ had spread to the public, and the cycle of death began.
While the GIDG continues to organize and moderate task forces all over the world, many experts worry that these efforts will be too late to deliver the desired results. “We are on the verge of a global epidemic,” our Savitech source confirmed. “To be honest, the new mutation has us all fearing for our lives.”
If our sources are to be believed, there is no longer any method of curbing the symptoms, no successful means of quarantine, and no viable hope for a cure. Dr. Paolo provided perhaps the most succinct—and chilling—analysis to date: “We have no tools to fight this. Humankind has been brought to its knees.”
Ana lets go of the paper and watches it blow away down the street. Everything is eerily still. Lights are on in the buildings overlooking the street, but there are no movements inside. And there are no people, no cars—not even the sound of scurrying animals. Just the night and the wind, and the lone newspaper death-dancing down the road.
The paper catches on the bumper of a car, and Ana sees a half-empty shopping bag in the gutter next to it. Groceries are spilled across the curb. Lying next to them, half in the street, is a body. A body in a pool of blood.
She sees another body lying farther down the street, head bent at an odd angle. She turns to look behind her and sees a car—how could she have missed it?—half smashed through the window of a bank on the corner. Two or three still forms farther down the dark sidewalk look like what Ana now knows they must be: more bodies.
The dead are everywhere in this new old world.
A sob rises in her throat. Is the whole world dead?
The street is suddenly ringing with a silence that claws her ears. The thought of never hearing another voice, never seeing another person consumes her.
She yells, “Is anybody here? Is there anyone that’s still alive?”
The words echo up and down the empty street. There are no survivors here. There’s just the corpse of a world she cannot remember, a past she can’t even properly mourn.
Though she probably won’t be mourning it for long. Now that she’s back, she’s sure to catch this disease, too. Something that virulent? It’s just a matter of time.
Then something buzzes in her back pocket.
Ana reaches down and pulls out a slim see-through device—
a phone!
—the size of her palm. She looks at the screen.
1 new text message
Her fingers tremble as she navigates the touch screen. The window opens up, and Ana falls into the words.
RU alive? Where?
A mad churning starts in Ana’s stomach as she looks at the sender.
Ysa Klein
She thinks of the last time she saw Ysa on far-off Paradox, of how she was pulled out of Ana’s grasp, of the fear and resignation clouding her bright eyes. Ysa is gone, Ana would swear to that.