Gliese 581

by Christine D. Shuck

  Perhaps a little too beautiful. Liza knew she was pretty. A few snaps of her fingers and the boys had come running. But not the good ones, oh no, the crappy ones who were desperate to get into her pants and then run like hell when faced with a reality that they were unprepared for.

  And of course, she had insisted on keeping the baby.

  He had slept on the couch, unwilling to sleep in the bed he and Edith had shared for so many years, the one in which she had spent her final weeks before the virus kicked into full gear with such devastating consequences.

  Within a week, Gina had moved out of the apartment and on to another middle-aged sugar daddy. A man who, like Tom, was desperately trying to ignore the creeping advance of middle-age by snaring a nubile young woman. He wished the guy luck and found that he was relieved.

  Tom thought of his eldest son Tommy, who was currently making a career of glaring at him through a haze of alcohol and drugs, barely sober. His son hadn’t waited long after the funeral before escaping the house to drink with his buddies and drown his sorrows over his mother’s shocking end. As it was, Tom barely saw him, it seemed as if Tommy was doing his best to come and go when Tom was away from the house at work.

  Joseph rarely left his room, especially when Tom was at home, and refused to even sit at the same table with him. The boy missed his mother. He also obviously blamed Tom for not being at home when he had been needed the most.

  Liza, and his constantly screaming granddaughter were his only companions at the dinner table most nights – and Tom found that he almost preferred the screaming baby to Liza’s sullen silence.

  Most days Tom alternated between deep guilt, for he had been unfaithful to Edith for years, and a terrible dread over what was happening inside of him and the rest of his remaining family.

  He knew it, he had even seen it coming. Edith hadn’t, she couldn’t even have dreamed of how deep the rabbit-hole went at EcoNu. He was sure of it. And now it was out, and he had it, and he knew it wasn’t just him. A touch, a simple handshake would do it, had done it, to countless others. Hug someone, let them breathe on each other, he thought to himself, that’s all it takes.

  Tom’s stomach rumbled ominously. He sipped more water and reached for the last of the sandwiches on the tray. He still had half of a bag of chips by his left hand. The meeting had barely started, and the tray, once heaped with small squares of delicately made sandwiches was now empty. Along the long conference room table, the same was true of every other tray, picked clean. He saw his colleague Anna Quinlan, Scott Dorns replacement, staring at the sandwich in his hand with an intense longing. His stomach rumbled again and he bit into it. At this point, the packets of sweeteners and powdered creamers were beginning to look good.

  Tom couldn’t help wondering how long he had. Was it a matter of days? Even weeks? Or would his life be measured in mere hours?

  Edith had been gone seven days. The kids had all been exposed, especially the kids, along with hundreds if not thousands of others. The sheer possibilities of the spread of the virus were endless. Tom thought of the CDC and dismissed it, there was no point really, no way to detect it, and no way to stop it now.

  “Dr. Hainey?”

  A voice from the head of the table interrupted his mental wanderings. The sandwich was gone, down the hatch and his stomach screamed for more.

  “Dr. Hainey?”

  Kelly Armstrong, CEO of EcoNu, who would have been a stunningly attractive woman if she wasn’t such a stone-cold bitch, was staring at him from the head of the table. For that matter, they were all staring. He swallowed dryly, not bothering to brush the crumbs from his mouth.

  She spoke again, a patently false smile on her face.

  “Dr. Hainey, are you with us? I was asking if you have had any progress on a kill switch for the virus.”

  Tom ignored the question.

  “The virus is elegant, we made sure of that.” His voice sounded rusty, unused. His stomach twisted with hunger, growling its discomfort. He grabbed three small packets, one sugar, and two powdered creamers.

  “Yes, yes, I know. Your initial reports lauded it as the best feat of viral engineering ever seen.” Her voice was sharp, grating.

  “But what I am asking is...”

  “You wanted it easy to implement, impossible to get rid of.” He said, cutting her off. “How was it you worded it, ah yes, ‘We must perfect a virus that creates total reliance on EcoNu, our pigs, feed, whatever was required.’ After all, you wanted something that couldn’t be copied, couldn’t be stolen, and would stick in the genes of the product like some kind of proverbial glue.” He ripped open the packet of sugar, tilted his head back and gulped it down. His guts screamed for more.

  “Dr. Hainey, if you would please just...”

  Tom practically snarled, “And what about the T2? The inclusion of that enzyme was completely deliberate and you should know there is no ‘off switch.’ How do you think the public will react when the second part of the virus makes itself known?”

  In a strictly dollars and sense point of view, having a next-generation kill order within the growth virus had made sense. EcoNu was a for-profit company, no matter their carefully crafted public image. The T2 enzyme was EcoNu’s ace in the hole. They would offer the viral therapy at a fraction of the cost that pig farmers were currently incurring (when the regular die-offs were factored in) and ensure that 98% of the baby pigs would survive infancy and grow to twice the size in half the time, ultimately saving on feed and upkeep.

  “You called it ‘a deal that had no downside’. By the time the farmers figured out that the treated pigs were sterile thanks to the virus, EcoNu could step in with our latest development, enormous factories that produce test-tube pigs - ensuring nearly complete control over the supply and production of pork here and around the world.”

  Kelly Armstrong tried to interrupt again, “Dr. Hainey, please...”

  Tom railroaded over her, and from the look on her face, the CEO was quite unused to such treatment.

  “I’ve seen the schematics. The factories are already being prepared. In less than a decade, EcoNu could have 80% of the worldwide market on pork secured and under its control. And when that happened, we would control the price of pork however we wished. But there won’t be anyone left to eat the fucking bacon, will there?”

  EcoNu had wanted world domination when it came to their products, and now they had it. He suppressed a giggle, his sanity teetering on the edge, it just wasn’t what they had bargained for. And no one knew. Not yet anyway.

  The giggle began to spill out, tears stood in his eyes. Tears of sadness? Perhaps. They began to roll down his cheeks, huge drops, and his entire body began to shake. He was laughing, this strange hybrid of hysteria – laughing with tears. He continued, despite the odd stares from his co-workers and the incensed look on the CEOs face. He couldn’t help it.

  If only he could go back and undo it all; be the husband his wife had deserved, that his kids needed him to be. But no, that wasn’t going to happen, was it? He had screwed up royally. His kids hated him, the woman he promised to love for the rest of his life was gone, and he, he was a dead man. So were the people in this room.

  When staring all of those realities head on, a little gallows humor made sense. It wouldn’t take long for the world and the researchers at the CDC, to figure it out. EcoNu had customized, incubated, and released a virus that turned out to be capable of killing every last human on the planet – and all for the sake of a plate full of bacon with the EcoNu name on it. He choked out a giggle.

  “Dr. Hainey?” Kelly Armstrong stared at Tom with narrowed eyes, “Are you ill?”

  Tom’s hysterical giggle bubbled up, “A kill switch? It’s part of the herpes simplex family. There’s no kill switch.”

  The CEO looked livid as Tom continued to laugh, chewed up bits of food and spittle flying through the air. Several of his nearby colleagues flinched away.

  Kelly Armstrong’s voice dripped acid, “And yet somehow
you find this funny.”

  Tom could barely breathe, the hysterical laughter bubbled over.

  “We are the walking dead. Yet we sit here, on a committee, while outside the world...”

  He jumped up from his seat, ran to the side of the room where the map showed outbreaks of the virus, starting with a huge red star in the middle of the United States, that star was Edith’s. He stabbed at the stars, clusters of them in Europe, New York, California, the Midwest, sprinkled throughout Asia, a large cluster appearing in Guiyang, which he stabbed with his finger.

  “Guiyang, home of over seven million people. At least it was full of people until China bombed it the hell off the map while trying to stop the virus. London, an international hub of travel, Paris, yet another hub, Rome and more. New York? L.A.! It is everywhere.”

  His co-workers were looking frightened.

  “Edith,” his voice hitched as he spoke his ex-wife’s name, “Edith wasn’t in all of these cities. It’s broken past her, it is spreading to the entire world and it is far too late to try to stop it. You have it,” he said pointing at the blond CEO. He turned his attention to Anna Quinlan who stared at his finger as if it were a gun.

  “She has it, I have it. We all have it. There is no kill switch, there’s only death.”

  His colleagues were wincing, drawing away from him, and one of the assistants had begun muttering urgently into a phone in the corner of the room. Tom bulldozed on through, ignoring the growing fear his co-workers were showing as they edged away from him.

  “You wanted EcoNu to have a stranglehold on the production and sale of swine and damned if you didn’t get it. Congratulations. Corporate bullshit, as if The Collapse didn’t give us enough warning about what a corporation can do, will do, and has done just for an extra billion in profit.”

  As the security team entered, his voice gained momentum and he swept the room with his finger.

  “You sealed our fates and we are all complicit. Now we get to pay the price. You are all going to die. Every. Last. One of you. We designed the virus to be highly communicable – ‘infect other pigs,’ you said, ‘that way the farmers will have to come to us when the sterility kills all possibility of natural reproduction.’ Just like the cornfields or the wheat in the early part of this century. Damned if we didn’t repeat the exact same mistakes, do the same fucked up thing that blew up in our faces and meant changing the company name from Monsanto to EcoNu. As if a change in name would make everything all nice and clean again!”

  The CEOs face narrowed with fury and surprise and Tom laughed again.

  “Oh yeah, didn’t think I knew that, did you?”

  The security officers had reached him, “Sir, you are going to have to come with us.”

  Tom struggled in their grasp, his skin hot now to the touch, “One touch is all it takes,” he screamed.

  A split second later, he pulled loose from the grasping hands and his co-workers scattered, cowering away from him.

  “We have all been infected, it’s too late to find a kill switch even if there was one. We are all going...to... die!”

  “Security, get him out now!” Kelly Armstrong’s voice cut through the air.

  Spittle and bits of food flew through the air as the security team grabbed him again and hustled Tom Hainey out of the conference room.

  There was a terrible silence in the moments afterward. Anna Quinlan was actively shaking, and several others just sat in shocked silence.

  Kelly Armstrong, patted her perfectly coiffed blond curls, straightened her tailored suit, and her hands went briefly to the pearl necklace at her throat before she sniffed and said, “Well, that was unfortunate. The man is obviously traumatized by his wife’s untimely death. Truly, her death was shocking. It also must be pointed out that it has yet to be verified as having anything to do with EcoNu.”

  She took a moment and stared around the room, meeting each employee’s eyes in turn.

  “We cannot jump to conclusions as Dr. Hainey did, or collapse into a panic when there is not necessarily something to panic over.”

  She paused for a moment, waiting for everyone to recover from the ugliness of Tom’s outburst.

  “Ted,” she said, turning her attention to the assistant who had called security, “ask the cafeteria to send up more sandwiches, and anything else they might have on hand. Also, please be sure to relay to Security that Dr. Hainey is to be taken directly to Two Rivers Hospital and that he is to receive the best psychiatric care possible, on EcoNu’s dime of course. No charges will be filed, not for someone who is clearly grief-stricken over his recent loss.”

  The assistant nodded and scuttled out of the room.

  “Now, let’s get back to business. Dr. Quinlan, are we sure that the virus was from our pigs? Someone suggested that it was...” she consulted her notes, “similar in nature to a virus known as pseudorabies? Could I get a clear explanation, in layman’s terms, to describe this situation better?”

  Anna Quinlan quietly sat down in her seat, still shaking, and paged through the documentation.

  “Yes, ma’am, I believe I can help with that.”

  Her fingers pulled the empty tray of sandwiches closer, swiping at the few stray crumbs, and trying desperately to ignore the yawning cavern that was her stomach long enough to get through the meeting.

  “The Pseudorabies virus was the building block that we used to genetically engineer the virus. It’s a delivery system if you will. The test subjects exhibit a small increase in overall core body temperature, accompanied by a sharp rise in appetite. The more they eat, the faster they grow and time to rendition is reduced from nine months to just under six months. This shortened time reduced the overall feed price and we are seeing a solid thirty-five percent savings. This means we can offer our meats for a more competitive price and increase the supply to more than double in the CAFO operations overseas.”

  The meeting continued, with Anna answering the CEOs questions, a semblance of normalcy returned to the rest of the group, and two more plates of sandwiches were delivered and immediately consumed by the occupants. Hours later, the memory of Tom Hainey being dragged out by security would stay fresh in everyone’s mind. Although the halls had mostly emptied out at EcoNu long before the incident – accounts of it spread in bars, through emails and frightened whispers.

  The next Monday only three-quarters of the workforce showed up and that quickly dropped off with each day that followed.

  By the time a phalanx of CDC officials and military pushed their way through the tall glass doors of EcoNu’s headquarters in Kansas City three weeks later, barely one in one hundred of the EcoNu workers remained. Many had already sickened and died, while others had fled in a desperate attempt to outrun a virus that was already deeply entrenched within them. The only thing they were successful at was in spreading it further.

  Vision in Red

  “We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.” – Carl Sagan

  Date: 01.27.2104

  Calypso Colony Ship

  He wasn’t going to make it. The access door glowed white hot, but the crew still hadn’t broken through. The alarms continued to shriek. The intensity of them hammered his already battered skull, and he could feel his pulse jumping in time. The heavy, coppery taste of blood filled his mouth. His tongue had been lacerated at some point, perhaps during the fight, or when he hit the floor of the Cryo Deck, his teeth digging deep into the sensitive organ. It was swelling, and still bleeding, He tried to spit out the mouthful of blood, but it just dribbled down his chin. He had no strength left to spit, it seemed, and the world tilted, his vision blurring.

  Daniel kept moving, his feet clumsy, stuck on legs that felt heavy and unyielding. He keyed in the sequence, it beeped, and he tried again. On the third try, the words scrolled.
<
br />   MANUAL OVERRIDE INITIATED

  BEGIN EMERGENCY REVIVAL SEQUENCE ON YOUNG, NISKA

  03:58 MINUTES UNTIL REVIVAL

  SYSTEM RESET ON ALL CRYO PODS IN 10:29 MINUTES

  Four rows to go, with nearly eighty innocent people still in their pods, completely unaware of the grim fate that awaited them. His friends, people whose talents the entire colony depended upon. But despite this, Daniel was moving slow, struggling with every ounce of his being.

  It had taken him three tries on the last pod to enter the correct sequence and initiate the emergency revival. He was barely able to stand, his hands were cold and they shook. The blood from the blow he had taken to his head still ran freely, and he squinted out of one clear eye, too tired to bother wiping his face.

  His mind was wandering too. Perhaps it was blood loss, perhaps Luke and Janine weren’t really there, but damned if they didn’t seem so real. Luke looked exactly as he had the day Daniel had last saw him, Janine as well, wearing that sad, disapproving look she could get. His vision blurred again, and he wondered if he would see Toby.

  “No,” came his own voice, slow and slurred, as if he had been drinking, “Toby isn’t dead. At least someone you love is still alive.”

  Luke’s specter nodded at him. Janine’s just looked pissed.

  “I have to save them,” Medry muttered, cold and clumsy hands reaching for the next Cryo pod.

  He pressed the keys, blacking out momentarily at a critical juncture, repeating it once, then twice, before it came out right.

  MANUAL OVERRIDE INITIATED

  BEGIN EMERGENCY REVIVAL SEQUENCE ON LYONS, THEO

  03:58 MINUTES UNTIL REVIVAL

  SYSTEM RESET ON ALL CRYO PODS IN 10:22 MINUTES

  The crazy bastard who had done this, who had murdered his friends Deeks and Evers, lay unmoving on the Cryo Deck floor behind him, a pool of his own blood spreading from his nose and mouth. Medry couldn’t help but hope that the man was dead. His mind simply could not conceive of a world in which his actions made sense.