The Tomorrow Code (27 page)

“So you are familiar with the concept, the theory, of macroscopic pathogens.”

“No,” Rebecca said, as if it were a stupid question, “but I know what a pathogen is, and I know what
macroscopic
means. But that’s impossible. Surely!”

Tane had no idea what
macroscopic
meant. He tried to work it out.

Crowe said, “Just because something is beyond the realm of what we already know doesn’t make it impossible. You’d better come and look at this.”

He stood and led them toward the long glass tank, still covered, in the center of the room.

They stood around the tank as he reached out and pulled off the cover in a single movement. The tank was filled with thick, impenetrable fog. Thick rubber gloves were embedded into the sides of the tank at intervals down its sides.

“You got a sample of the mist,” Rebecca said. “Have you analyzed it?”

“Mmmm.” Crowe seemed distracted. “Inconclusive results as yet. But that’s not what I wanted to show you.”

Tane looked deeply into the mist. Was there something moving around in there?

“What, then?” Rebecca asked.

“This.”

Crowe placed one hand on the side of the glass tank, then tapped the glass with his free hand. There was a low whistling noise from within the tank, and suddenly, from out of the mist, a shape materialized, flying at high speed toward the palm of his hand. Tane, Rebecca, and Fatboy jumped, and even Crowe flinched involuntarily as the shape slammed into the side of the tank. He withdrew his hand.

“What the hell is that?” Fatboy asked. Tane just stared, openmouthed.

“We call them
jellyfish,
” Crowe said. “They seem to be attracted by vibrations. Either movement or sound.”

Tane could see where the name had come from, although this creature was far smaller than any jellyfish he had ever seen in the ocean. It was about the size of a large bumblebee, a bulbous shape made of a gelatinous, translucent material. The main body seemed to be in three parts, forming a Y shape, with a mass of thin fibrous tentacles trailing underneath.

“You caught that in the fog?” Rebecca asked.

Crowe shook his head. “Nope. We just sucked up a sample of the fog and released it into this tank, to help us study it. There were no jellyfish in it then.”

“Then how…?”

“They just formed, out of the mist. Little dense patches at first that gradually got bigger.”

“Holy crap,” said Fatboy.

Rebecca said incredulously, “You’re not trying to tell me that that is a macroscopic pathogen.”

“What on earth is a macroscopic pathogen?” Tane asked.

Crowe looked appraisingly at him. “A pathogen is an organism that attacks another larger organism. Like bacteria or a virus attacks the human body. All the pathogens we know of are microscopic. Too small to be seen with the naked eye.”

Southwell added, “
Macroscopic
means large enough to be seen without a microscope.”

Rebecca scoffed, “You’re not trying to tell me that this creature is some kind of giant virus!”

Crowe almost smiled, just a brief twitch at the corners of his mouth. “A giant virus? No. Viruses are subcellular. Smaller than a human cell. They have to be. They crawl into cells to attack them. No, not a giant virus.”

The small jellyfish-like creature drifted slowly away from the wall of the tank, losing definition gradually in the mist.

Crowe continued, “I attended a lecture a few years ago. At Oxford. A Doctor Hans Heinrich was the lecturer, a highly respected immunologist. He hypothesized the existence of macroscopic pathogens. Not viruses, but bacterial clusters.”

He paused and looked around the little group. “Bacteria are single-celled organisms. But if you grow a whole lot of them together, then they form a colony, or cluster together, in what we call a
biofilm.
And a bacterial cluster can show characteristics quite different from those of a single bacteria. They exchange chemical signals between cells, and the cluster itself can grow into a quite specific shape. We see wave patterns, towers, and other structures. Dr. Heinrich suggested the existence of bacterial clusters that behaved as a single organism. Perhaps as large as a grain of salt. Thousands of individual bacteria, acting in concert. A single macroscopic pathogen. Invading the body, then overwhelming its defenses by the sheer volume of the bacterial cells released. To the best of our knowledge, that is what we have here.”

Fatboy mumbled, “It’s a bit bigger than a grain of salt.”

Rebecca said, “You’re not trying to tell us that these terrorists, these ‘snowmen’ in the fog, have developed bacterial clusters that are trained to attack humans.”

Crowe shook his head. “They’re not ‘trained’ to attack humans any more than a cold virus is ‘trained’ to attack us. It’s just what they are. It’s what they do. But we can’t find any reference to bacterial clusters, or anything even remotely connected to it, anywhere in Green’s journals. That is where I was hoping you might have a little more inside knowledge.”

One of the other soldiers approached and said quietly, although for little purpose, as they could still hear every word, “We are ready for the test now, Doctor.”

“Then get on with it,” Crowe said.

“Z1 or Z2?”

Crowe shrugged. “Whichever.”

“They are living creatures. Why do you call them by numbers?” Rebecca asked. “Why not give them names?”

“They’re not pets,” Crowe replied curtly. “Pets have names. These are lab animals.”

The Texan opened one of the animal cages and the older-looking chimp, Z2, jumped out with a squeal of delight and began tousling the tall man’s hair.

He smiled and Tane laughed.

“She’s got character.” Rebecca smiled. “I’ll name her for you.” She thought for a moment. “Z-two, zeto…”

“Zeta,” supplied Tane.

Rebecca looked at him for a moment, before accepting it.

“Zeta,” she said. “Hi, Zeta!”

Zeta looked over at her and held out a hand as if she would like to jump onto Rebecca, but the Texan held the animal firmly.

Crowe did not find it funny. “They’re not pets,” he repeated.

“Makes it harder to stick electrodes in their brains and vivisect them, doesn’t it,” Rebecca said with a little-girl innocence completely at odds with her words. “How about the other one, Z-one?”

“Xena,” suggested Tane.

“Zeta and Xena,” Rebecca declared. “And what little test have we got lined up for you today, Zeta?” She held out a hand to Zeta, who patted it and looked up at her with big, sad clown eyes.

“We’re going to put her in the tank,” Crowe said flatly, to Rebecca’s look of horror.

The end of the tank was a separate box, sealed off from the rest of the tank by a glass door with thick rubber seals.

They let Zeta climb in the box, which she did willingly, trustingly, and then sealed the lid above her. In the main compartment of the tank, there were whistling, swishing noises as the jellyfish, agitated, swept around in circles in the mist.

Zeta jumped a little and turned around and around inside the small area, but otherwise didn’t seem too concerned about being shut in a glass box.

“You can’t!” Rebecca said, again and again. “You can’t put her in the tank with that thing!”

Southwell, looking quite uncomfortable, tried to explain. “She’ll give us very valuable data. Chimps are our closest cousins.”

Manderson contributed, “Genetically, they are ninety-nine percent the same as humans.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Rebecca muttered, but the insult went straight over Manderson’s curly head.

Crowe said, “We need to know what these pathogens can do to us.”

“And you need to sacrifice an innocent animal to find out?”

“It’s just one chimp,” Crowe said with a look of annoyance. “Fifty thousand human beings got ‘sacrificed’ in Whangarei. And there’ll be more if we can’t figure out what is going on.”

With a nod from Crowe, Manderson released the seals and Zeta’s compartment flooded with the fog.

“No!” shrieked Rebecca. She pressed her fingers against the glass by Zeta’s head. Zeta looked at her and gave her a big clown smile. The other USABRF men gathered around to watch.

Zeta seemed bemused by the fog at first, as it started to fill her chamber, then a little confused as it thickened around her. The jellyfish whistled around in the thick of the fog, avoiding the thin vapor at the other end.

“They can’t exist outside of the fog,” Crowe murmured, watching intently. “They can’t move, they can’t live. It’s their nutrition and their locomotion.”

One jellyfish flashed down the side of the tank near them. By now the fog had spread evenly between the two partitions. The jellyfish whirled around Zeta, then disappeared back into the fog.

That was all. Nothing else happened.

After a while, Zeta went for a walk. Tane held his breath and could hear from the sharp intake of air from Rebecca that she was doing the same.

Zeta wandered through the main tank, comically trying to wave the fog away from in front of her eyes. She found one of the jellyfish, drifting at about her eye level, and Tane winced as she stretched out a hand toward it.

The jellyfish remained motionless. She even batted at it with her hand, swatting it like a fly, but without effect.

“It’s not interested in her,” Southwell said with a puzzled look.

“Okay, that’s long enough,” Crowe said.

“Go, Zeta!” Rebecca yelled in a mixture of delight and relief, hopping from one leg to the other and punching the air. “You go, girl!”

Zeta screeched and danced happily inside the cage, a little two-legged, two-armed Irish jig. Tane and Fatboy laughed, but Crowe just shook his head.

They reversed the procedure with the small compartment at the end of the tank, sealing off the main section before pumping in air and extracting the fog.

“Are you going to let her out?” Rebecca asked.

“She may be contaminated,” Crowe replied, then, a little too quickly, said, “Dr. Southwell, would you show them the journals?”

Southwell led them to the far side of the room, where a series of notebooks were spread out on a table.

“Professor Green’s notes,” she said. “Do you know much about what they were researching?”

“Tell me,” Rebecca said. “Vicky told us it was rhinoviruses.”

“Actually, it was rhinoviruses they were researching. They did a small amount of work on NLVs, but only for a short time, to confirm some aspect of their main research. They were researching conserved antigens. That’s common structures within the viruses that can—”

“She told us about that too,” Rebecca interrupted. “How much do you know about the Chimera Project?”

Southwell said, “Conserved antigens proved to be elusive. Our immune systems just kept getting fooled by the changing shapes of the viruses. It was a dead end.”

“So?”

“Professor Green recently gained health department approval to experiment on the other side of the equation.”

“The human side of the equation?”

“Yes. They were playing around with bone marrow, where antibodies are produced, genetically engineering our immune systems to try to produce a generic antibody.”

“An antibody that would recognize any kind of virus.”

“Any kind of rhinovirus. That was the field they were concentrating on.”

“And how,” Rebecca asked, a little skeptically, “do you start to create a generic antibody?”

“The scope of the project approval was quite specific. They were genetically splicing together different kinds of antibodies, creating a…” She trailed off, seemingly unwilling to finish the sentence.

“A chimera.” Rebecca finished it for her. “Is that it? Is there anything else you can tell me?”

Southwell shook her head. “Nothing. Professor Green had not yet submitted a report on the results of the research. All we have is her notes.” She indicated the table again. “Would you mind having a look through? Tell us if anything sticks out.”

“Of course,” Rebecca said, and picked up the first journal.

Tane idly leafed through one. Rebecca was the only one with a hope of understanding them, but it was interesting to see the clearly handwritten notes, dates, and formulas that the late Professor Green had written. Vicky’s handwriting was small, neat and verbose, flowing on, page after page. Tane idly wondered why she hadn’t just typed up her notes on a computer.

Fatboy was the first to notice, glancing across at the other side of the room. “What are they doing?” he wondered.

Tane looked across, and Rebecca also. Two of the men had their hands in the gloves in the sides of the compartment. One was holding Zeta while the other ran a needle into her arm.

Zeta didn’t like it; she screeched and snarled at the men.

“They’ll be taking a blood sample,” Rebecca said. “To see if the fog had any effect on her.”

She looked back at the journal she was reading, only to look up again a second later to check on Zeta.