The Leap, page 25
Jonathan Lee went back out to the living room, where the group was deep into a philosophical discussion about computer and biological viruses. Were either of them living organisms? Had someone invented a computer virus that was just that? And how could it be transmitted?
“Are any of you familiar with the Sangstrom code?”
“I worked on it once, for the prize, but, you know, no one’s ever cracked it,” Violet Rushman said while she opened a shell and started eating a peanut. “I was hoping to win.”
“Everyone’s hoping to win,” Dorian said. She was staring at the floor, gazing at something while she spoke. “Even I had a go at it once. But it’s a complete waste of energy. It’s like trying to figure out how to breathe in a vacuum—it’d be great to know how, but why spend the rest of your life on something that impossible?”
“Well, my friends, we’re going to have to spend our time on something that impossible right now, because it seems more than likely Juno Sangstrom wrote this virus,” Jonathan Lee said.
Violet put down the peanut she was holding and said, “Let me at it.” She took out her computer and was about to turn it on, but Jonathan Lee said, “Use your scroll. Don’t want you to get infected.”
“No one’s gotten infected from their scroll?”
“Not that we know of. I’ve been thinking the leap might be transmitted through the photonic filamentation and—”
“Dorian.” Glen was standing up. “Dorian, shut it off.”
Jonathan Lee looked over to where Dorian was sitting with Beryl’s computer and saw she had the array cast onto the floor. The most common casting location was the air at eye level, but Dorian liked looking down. She’d been the one to suggest not turning on any computers, yet here she was, doing it herself.
“What?” Dorian said, looking up. “Sorry, I haven’t been paying attention. This is so interesting.”
“Don’t—” But she’d put her hand on the filamental array before Jonathan Lee could stop her.
Glen jumped up and shut off the computer.
“What the hell?” Dorian reached out to turn it back on, but Glen picked up the cube and stuffed it in his pocket. “Pay attention. Use your scroll.”
“But this is one of the infected computers. We have to examine it.”
“You may’ve just gotten it yourself,” Glen said. “We don’t need another victim.”
“Look,” Jonathan Lee said, “we know Beryl’s computer’s infected and I’ve isolated the virus. I want you all working on the program itself. Now that, thanks to Ledyard, we have a lead on how it might be coded—that should help. And Ledyard himself will be here in a few hours. Hang on.”
Jonathan Lee took out his comm and saw the message from Sean: Ziva says Ethan asking for you. Meet you at the clinic.
Chapter 36
Was competence the most desirable virtue? With the world slowed down to a standstill, Charley Pierce had plenty of time to contemplate such pointless questions. Did it matter what the most desirable virtue was if you were dead? Althea had been one of the most competent people Charley had ever known, yet her competence was now irrelevant.
Charley’s banished assistant Morana was competent and she was putting it to good use. She’d made most of the funeral arrangements in less than three hours—slower than Charley would’ve have liked but faster than anyone else might’ve done—and she’d sent Charley a list of the people he’d probably want to invite into the house for the private get-together after the ceremony and bonfire.
He was reading through the list when Morana commed him back, asking what fuel or fuel combinations he’d prefer for the bonfire. She was indeed competent. Maybe competence was the most desirable virtue. Goodness was supposed to be a virtue, but it was indefinable. Charley’s idea of goodness and Althea’s hadn’t been congruent, yet even Charley could argue Althea’s contrarian case, maybe even agree with it.
Then there was fidelity—an antiquated idea having something to do with the spread of disease, was Charley’s guess. Back in the olden times when sexually transmitted diseases couldn’t be cured and people died horrible deaths.
Now that people were dying of some unknown virus, what would the new virtue be? Unaccounted-for good health? He shook his head. He knew he was just distracting himself from the facts. That Althea was dead. That her funeral was tomorrow. That she’d died of an unknown ailment. That she should be alive. That by this time tomorrow his wife would be a scattering of ashes floating down the river at Tuigen. That he’d been—
Charley was about to comm his other assistant, Burman, but hadn’t Morana said something about his quitting Pierce Sangstrom? Helluva time to do it, just when Charley needed him, no matter how incompetent he’d been.
It was too bad Beryl Carson had died. Charley could really use someone to talk to right now and she’d been intelligent and insightful. He should’ve been having an affair with her starting the day he’d first met her. Isn’t that what he’d told Althea? Yet she’d been incapable of jealousy. If he had one lover, then she had a hundred. His one was nothing.
And his one was dead. Dragging her body down the hallway at the Normandie had been one of the worst moments of Charley Pierce’s life. Looking over his shoulder the entire way, convinced the reclusive Juno was going to pick that very moment to come out of her apartment, just in time to witness Charley with Beryl Carson’s corpse.
Beryl had been a wonderful dinner companion. Agretta’s had been as good as ever. Better. Their lovemaking had been excellent, considering that neither of them had had any recent experience.
But when he woke up at four in the morning, there was Beryl, as still as death itself, he’d thought then. Because she was dead. If he’d thought she might not be, Charley would’ve called for medical assistance. He kept telling himself he would’ve done that because he wasn’t the sort of person to leave someone else to die. Not if they could be helped. But Beryl was dead. Charley had checked everything on a dead person necessary to be checked—the instructions were all there on the mesh—and Beryl had no chance of being revived.
Honesty was a virtue Charley didn’t much care about—another worn-out concept Charley figured had been developed by the upper classes to keep the peasants at their mercy. Honesty meant those below had to pay up. That expression—paying up—had likely originated from the practice of the poor paying the rich. And the rich had turned this into a poor person’s virtue—pay your way, nothing in this life is free, and something about giving tribute where it was due.
Hard work was another overrated virtue, something else the ruling class had foisted off on their lessers. Charley himself never had to work another day in his life and he was one of the richest people on the continent. Had he gotten there through hard work? Charley always said he had, but that was an exaggeration. He’d just done what he was going to do anyway and the riches had come to him. Even more riches than the ones he’d been born with.
Vices, though, weren’t the opposite of virtues, even if they were supposed to be. Useful vices, like greed, were beneficial to their practitioners. Useless vices, like gluttony, were neither here nor there. If someone wanted to be a glutton, let them. Charley knew a lot of successful gluttons. Their vice hadn’t hindered them.
Maybe sins were the opposites of virtues. Charley thought about this while contemplating murdering Lukas Adler, one of the people who should’ve been dead. After all, she had two other dead lovers, and maybe a third, if Charley’s guesses about Vern Healy were correct. He’d been spying on Althea and maybe she’d seduced him.
Althea had been unparalleled in the art of seduction—or maybe it wasn’t an art but either a vice or a virtue, he wasn’t sure which. Seduction was a natural part of her being. She didn’t have to actively do anything. Her mere presence was seduction itself. It always worked on Charley. Even now that she was dead, the thought of her could seduce Charley. Maybe Althea had been Charley’s vice. She lured him on even though she’d disappeared into death.
Charley thought of making some comms, saying the words Althea died a few times. That that would help the reality sink in, as though reality had to work its way into your bloodstream in order for you to grasp it, when in fact reality was existence itself, inescapable.
The first thing, now that the funeral was on schedule, was to get back at Juno. Charley had to figure out how to do this in a way that wouldn’t jeopardize Pierce Sangstrom’s future and that wouldn’t stop them from using her new program to its powerful, ultimate ends. With Althea gone—she was dead, not just gone, Charley reminded himself—with Althea dead Charley could concentrate on increasing his reach, his power, his influence.
Why not? It’d be simple once Juno’s new program was polished and refined in the way that only Charley Pierce could effect. The program that would enter the user’s life and never let go, latching on to all their desires and motivations and turning them into even greater riches for Charley.
Yet Juno remained a boulder in his way. Juno was the only person who’d ever truly understand the program, who’d ever be able to expand it in ever more creative ways. Not killing its users but manipulating them, turning them toward whatever direction Charley wished, and all directions would directly benefit Charley.
But . . . Juno. Although now that she’d killed Althea—Charley’d convinced himself this was true—maybe she’d stop. After all, her intended victim was dead. Like other intended victims were.
Charley tried to arrange his thoughts in a logical pattern, moving them around like dice inside his skull. Some of these dice refused to budge and others seemed to be disintegrating before he had a chance to rearrange their placements.
Charley took off his pale blue tee and lay down on the floor of his office. Maybe he was in Morris’s office. His body was both here and across the room, staring out the window. Great ideas were working their way into compact cubes inside his cranium. Stacking them on top of each other proved to be too difficult so he made sinuous patterns with them instead.
Tomorrow Althea would make her final journey, burned into oblivion.
Chapter 37
Ethan Stiles’s bed was encased in a tent. Axel Booth had decided it was conceivable that this virus, a virus he was resistant to attributing to a computer, was so contagious that a tent was necessary. The other patients on the isolation ward, Maizy Newell and Jordan Fields, were also now inside tents. Booth wasn’t too happy with himself for not having done this sooner, although no one on the staff at the clinic had gotten ill. Or seemed to be ill.
He’d had a long conversation with Ziva Walls, who was obviously out of her mind with a combination of fear and lack of sleep. She’d barged into his office and demanded he listen to her.
“Dr. Booth, something has to be done. None of us has been successful and I’m hoping you’ll be able to wield your influence. After all, Althea Pierce just died of the leap and—”
“The leap? What are you talking about? Althea Pierce had a sort of viral infection”—Booth wasn’t sure it was a virus, but it was so much like one that he wasn’t uncomfortable with the nomenclature—“and she didn’t leap from anything. I think you need some sleep, Mrs. Walls. You should go home. I’ll contact you if anything changes with Dr. Stiles.”
“The leap virus. I’m sure Ethan told you about it although we didn’t have a name for it until recently. It’s what Ethan has, what Althea Pierce had, what Maizy and Jordan have. They got it from a computer.”
“You can’t mean you think these people got infected because they read about a disease on the mesh? Of course there have been odd cases in the past. People are very susceptible to suggestion, particularly a certain kind of person who spends too much time thinking about themself and every possibility of what could go wrong. But these cases didn’t involve multiple people. You see—”
“That isn’t at all what I meant. And I know Ethan had to have spoken to you about this. The disease is transmitted from a computer. Not a computer but any computer that’s already infected. It’s a computer virus, you see, only it’s capable of leaping across the divide between computer and human and then infecting people.”
Axel Booth sighed. Stiles had told him some crackpot theory about this virus, but even though he respected Ethan, Booth had listened only in spurts. He had patients to take care of and couldn’t be bothered with insane concepts, which this obviously was. Stiles had even gone so far as to show Booth what were supposedly autopsy reports on Oliver Hirata and Kaj Banerjee, but the information there was fantastical, unbelievable, hallucinatory. Someone had obviously faked the results and then convinced Stiles they were true.
“Mrs. Walls, please understand that what you’re suggesting is impossible. Computer viruses and biological viruses aren’t the same thing. A computer virus is just a program that infects—and that’s really a metaphor, not an actual infection—other parts of the computer. It can’t leap out of the computer and I don’t even know what you think it would do. Jump into someone’s body? Travel through a person’s bloodstream looking for a computer program it could interfere with?”
“Ethan told us the computer virus is RNA-based, just like the kind of virus that can cause human illness.”
“Still, it’s limited to computers. An actual virus is something else altogether.”
“I’m not an expert, but, as Ethan explained it, both computer viruses and biological viruses need a host. They can’t survive without one. And this is a computer virus that needs a human host, that’s seeking a human host. The computer wasn’t good enough. Or something like that. I don’t remember all the details. And anyway, I don’t see the difference.”
“Let me see if I can explain. The kind of virus you’re used to thinking of, the kind that would infect a person, is an organism that . . . wait, that’s not exactly right. It’s an entity—that’s better—because it’s never been determined if a virus is actually alive. It has no cellular structure and without a host it can’t exist.”
“The same as a computer virus.”
“I suppose you could think of it that way, but it’s very far from the facts. A computer virus is an invention of a human being. Now, why someone would invent one is not my field. I’m a doctor. Do no harm and all that. But a biological virus is not manmade. It’s not an invention. It’s a phenomenon of nature.”
Booth stopped himself. Maybe Ziva Walls wouldn’t know this, but he did: there were plenty of synthetic biological viruses that had been created in labs. Viruses that could cause massive damage. Back a few centuries ago work on one particular virus had been banned and all known specimens destroyed. Afterward, science had moved in another direction and . . .
“I don’t think this virus is a phenomenon of nature. I think someone wrote the code for this virus. I mean, I don’t know what to think. It’s what Ethan told us,” Ziva Walls said.
“It’s all very interesting, but it’s a fantasy. A computer cannot infect a human. Not really. It could display lies or threats, for example, and you could become fearful. But nothing can jump out of a computer and somehow enter your body.”
“Yet something did—and is. We’re trying to get all the computers at the Normandie shut down and I’m hoping you’ll be able to help.”
“You’re mistaking correlation for causation. Just because many of the patients have a connection to the Normandie doesn’t make something at the building—”
“The computers there are infected.”
“As I was saying, this doesn’t mean something at the building is the cause. Maybe someone in the building infected all the others. Not a computer. Or there’s a virus or something like a virus there that’s transmitted through any number of ways—through the air, through touch, through exchange of fluids—”
“Through a computer.”
“I have to go on rounds.” Axel Booth got up and gestured for Ziva Walls to leave his office with him. Really, the ideas some people had.
Yet as Booth was putting on his protective equipment he flipped through some of what Walls had said about Ethan’s theories, and one thought kept recurring: if a person could create a synthetic biological virus, then couldn’t a person create a synthetic virus that could be conveyed through a computer? Why couldn’t this happen? As far-fetched as it seemed, could it be that that was what was happening?
Maizy Newell. She kept fading in and out of consciousness, but when she was conscious it was a thin facade. She couldn’t speak or convey her thoughts or desires. She could move in only very slight motions. She’d stir then fade back again. She’d never spoken since she’d been admitted. She definitely had the pathogen present in her body that the other patients also did, yet it had expressed itself in different ways in all of them. He had hope for her. She was young and was otherwise healthy.
This evening she wasn’t stirring, her eyelids weren’t fluttering, and her pulse was slow and regular. More like sleep than unconsciousness.
He left her room and changed his protective equipment. The leap virus. What an absurd idea. On his way to see Jordan Fields the idea of leaping preoccupied Booth. How viruses could make the leap from an animal to a human host. From a doorknob someone had touched onto the skin of the next person who touched it. Viruses were sneaky bastards, desperate, doing anything they could to find a new host. It was that or die. Or, more accurately, cease to exist, since it was never alive.
Could there really be a virus that was in a computer and then leaped onto people?
Jordan Fields was a different sort of case, although he also had this pathogen in his system. He was unmoving and semiconscious. He spoke—well, anyway, he made sounds—but these sounds were in no language Booth or anyone he’d contacted could recognize or decipher. Booth had sent samples of Fields’s utterances to several linguists and some friends of his who knew more than a few languages and no one could figure out the words, if they were words, that Fields was speaking. Maybe Fields was just babbling, not really saying anything, but the pauses, the gestures, the cadence of it seemed to indicate an organized structure.
