The Viral Epiphany

by Richard McSheehy

  Captain Andrews thought about this for only a moment and then replied, “Sir, there were other men on duty in the torpedo room too. What about them? What about the corpsman? What about the other crew who have already been in contact with the man who died?”

  President Cranston said nothing for a minute. He knew the captain was right. It was too late. He looked back at Grace, not sure of what to say to her, and was surprised to see that she remained calm. Somehow, as she had suffered through her own ordeal on the submarine she had undergone a change. A sense of inner calm now showed clearly on her face. “Alan,” she said, “didn’t you say that you had heard that some researcher had created a vaccine for the disease?”

  “Hmm? Oh, you mean the guy in Ireland. Well, I wouldn’t hold out much hope for that, dear.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” the Captain said, “Someone might have created a vaccine? Of course I don’t know anything about it, and it may well be that it’s all bull. But sir, we’re pretty much out of options. I think it might be our only hope!”

  “He’s absolutely right, Alan!” Grace said as she stood up. “We should contact him and find out the details.”

  President Cranston looked at Grace in surprise. “Grace,” he said. “I…I…” He simply stood and looked at her for several seconds. Then he smiled warmly at her and said, “OK, we might as well try.”

  Five minutes later he called Harry Fields at the Centers for Disease Control and obtained the telephone number for Dan Quinn. Minutes later Dan’s mobile phone rang and a look of bewilderment crossed his face as he looked at the caller ID information and read: SSN Seawolf.

  What in the world? he said to himself as he answered the call, “Hello, this is Dan,” he said.

  “Is this Doctor Daniel Quinn?” the President asked.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Doctor, the is the President of the United States, Alan Cranston. I’m calling you because I have heard from the CDC that you may have created a vaccine for Asian Fever.”

  Dan wasn’t sure whether to believe this person or not. Could this really be the President? he wondered. He quickly concluded that, because he had mentioned the CDC and because the caller ID said SSN Seawolf that it must be him. “Yes, sir,” he replied cautiously, “that’s correct.”

  “Doctor, I need some information quickly. How soon does the vaccine take effect?”

  Dan looked over at Sheila who was sitting across from him at the small dining table in Brendan’s apartment. He wrote on a small piece of paper: The President of USA! Then he said, “Our estimates are that one achieves full immunity within twenty four hours of being vaccinated,” he replied. Sheila’s eyes and mouth opened widely in surprise.

  “What if a person has already been exposed? Will it still work?” the President asked.

  Dan took a few seconds to think before he replied. Then he replied, “I believe, from what I have been able to ascertain, that the incubation period for the disease can be anywhere from two or three days to perhaps over a week. Our computer simulations indicate that, if symptoms have not yet been observed, the vaccine should provide immunity even in infected individuals.”

  “I see,” the President said with a trace of hope rising in his voice. “How much vaccine do you have available?”

  “Right now, I only have five doses left; however, one of our pharmaceutical companies has just started production today so I believe we’ll have several thousand doses by tomorrow morning.”

  “Several thousand? How many doses are they making?

  “We’re planning to have five million doses available in Ireland within the next two weeks, sir.”

  President Cranston paused and did some mental calculations then asked, “That’s interesting…Five million doses in two weeks? Would you be able to supply us with about 120 doses by tomorrow?”

  “I believe we could, but how would I get it to you?

  “We’ll come and get it, Doctor. We’ll be arriving by submarine within twenty-four hours.”

  “Submarine? You’re coming to Cork by submarine?” Dan looked at Sheila and saw that her surprise matched his when she heard the words.

  “Yes, doctor. We’ll be there as fast as we can! I’ll call you again when we get there.”

  The President hung up and turned to Captain Andrews, “OK, Captain. Let’s see how fast this boat can take us to Ireland!”

  “Yes, sir” the Captain said.

  He quickly ran to the control room and shouted, “Helm! Set new course for Cork, Ireland. Maintain depth three hundred feet. Emergency speed. Now!”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the navigator replied, “Set course for Cork, Ireland. Depth three hundred feet. Emergency speed.” Seconds later, as the President and everyone else on board began counting the minutes, the Seawolf turned eastward and, as the large propeller blades began churning furiously in the water, the fast attack submarine began hurtling through the cold darkness of the Atlantic Ocean depths towards the south coast of Ireland.

  Thirty-Three

  It was his intelligence that separated Franklin James Singleton III from most men. It had been like that since he was a child, when he had first been introduced to the symbolic world of mathematics, a world where everything behaved according to discrete, predictable rules; a world of abstract perfection. Franklin himself, on the other hand, was the polar opposite of perfection. His associates usually described him as rude, caustic, emotionless, cruel, arrogant, thoughtless, selfish, or an enormous bastard - or, sometimes all of the above.

  Franklin was the only scientist employed in Omega’s Labyrinth 1 complex who regularly dressed in the same clothes for three days or more, who only wore clothing that he felt was comfortable, and who never paid attention to his appearance regardless of whom he was meeting. He was grossly overweight and didn’t care.

  Today, Franklin was sitting at conference room table in Lab 1 wearing an old pair of blue jeans, brown loafers, and a much too tight, red plaid shirt that had two, day-old, amoeba-shaped, coffee stains on the front pocket. He sat in his chair and took a bite out of a chocolate-covered donut while he waited. Franklin’s shirt was stretched so tightly around his abdomen that it had opened into little peepholes between the buttons, revealing oval-shaped patches of sweaty, alabaster-white skin and curly black hair. He was absently chewing the donut and staring into space when the door opened. General Baker walked in and sat down across from him.

  “Good morning, Franklin,” General Baker said. He was always cordial and deferential to Franklin because, despite his obvious shortcomings, Franklin was a mathematical genius, undoubtedly one of the top ten minds in the country. A month ago General Baker had requested that Franklin be transferred from Labyrinth 2 to Labyrinth 1 to work, for a brief time, on refining Lab 1’s disease propagation models. Accurate modeling of the effects and spread of Asian Fever had now become of critical importance to the nation.

  “Hi, John,” Franklin said to General Baker. He was probably the only employee in Lab 1 who never acknowledged military rank.

  “I heard you have some interesting results for me,” General Baker said.

  “Interesting is not the word, John. It’s really fascinating. Here, let me show you.” He popped the last piece of donut into his mouth and washed it down with a gulp of his extra large latte. Then he picked up the remote control for the large screen display system that covered one wall of the conference room and pushed the start button.

  An aerial scene of a city filled the screen and as Franklin pressed one of the buttons the camera zoomed in on one of the major intersections. “This is Times Square, New York,” he said. “It’s an image taken from one of our low Earth orbit Sentinel Satellites. Notice that it’s almost two in the afternoon, and there doesn’t seem to be anybody on the street at all.”

  General Baker studied the image for several seconds and then nodded. It was true he couldn’t see a single person. “What’s the resolution?” he asked.

  “This is taken at the highest resolution. It can pick up
items smaller than a dime.”

  “Incredible,” General Baker said. “What does the next slide show?”

  Franklin laughed lightly and then he said with a condescending smile, “John this isn’t a slide, this is live video. There’s nothing moving in Times Square!”

  General Baker slowly turned away from the screen. Then, with a surprised look on his face, he said to Franklin. “You mean everyone in New York City is dead?”

  “No. Not at all,” Franklin replied, “Although, I must admit the idea did cross my mind the first time I saw the live shots of Manhattan. Take a look at this,” He pressed another button on the remote control and the picture changed to a view of an apartment building complex on the Hudson River. “This is from a different Sentinel. It has just come up over the horizon, so instead of looking straight down, like the last one, here the view is pretty much horizontal to the ground.”

  General Baker said nothing as he nodded his head. “Now, watch this as I zoom in.” He pressed another button and the screen soon filled with image of a single apartment building and then it kept on zooming until a single window occupied the entire screen. “OK, now watch.”

  General Baker looked at the window and for fifteen seconds it only appeared to be an ordinary window; then he saw a woman walk across the screen from left to right. Seconds later she walked back in the other direction. He turned to Franklin for an explanation.

  “You’d be surprised what you can see,” Franklin said with a conspiratorial smile. General Baker simply stared at him and said nothing.

  Franklin suddenly stopped smiling, turned back to the screen, and said, “They’re not dead, John. They’re hiding inside their homes and apartments. It’s funny; they’re doing just what that guy from UNAPS was trying to force them to do. They all rebelled like crazy then… but they’re not rebelling anymore, are they?” he said with a chuckle.

  General Baker looked at him for several seconds, but then, with a small shake of his head, gave up trying to understand him. The son of a bitch has absolutely no trace of empathy, does he? he thought. “So what have you learned, Franklin? How well are the models working?”

  “John, your models aren’t worth shit – and that’s a fact.” He reached in the cardboard box next to him and took out another donut. “See, here’s the problem: your people made their disease propagation estimate based upon the bug spreading as a Gaussian distribution function. You know, the peak is at the origin and there are gradually fewer and fewer cases as you go further from the center.” He took a large bite of the donut. “The problem is that this is a dynamic process and the Gaussian distribution function doesn’t provide for a time-varying effect. The Gaussian is, at best, only an approximation of the final, steady state, solution. It can’t be used to provide an up to date model of the daily progress of the disease. Nor can it predict the ultimate outcome, with any accuracy, either.”

  “Here’s what I did,” he said as he switched the remote control to show a photo of the greater New York City area and its surroundings taken from a lower resolution satellite. “I looked at the data from visible and infrared satellite detection systems, plus some data from the orbiting millimeter wave radar satellites, and looked for indicators like motion, heat, people standing around, and of course pictures of bodies too.”

  General Baker continued staring at the screen but said nothing.

  “It turns out that the dynamic spreading pattern is more like what you see when you throw a rock in a pond. You know, a big splash in the middle and then ripples spreading out from the center. In our case the peaks of the ripples correspond to those areas with a high incidence of disease cases and the space between ripples indicates a very low incidence of cases.”

  “Interesting,” General Baker said, “What do you think is going on? I mean, why would it be like that?”

  “Human behavior. First the people flee the disease epicenter but they don’t stop just on the outskirts of the city; they want to put a buffer between themselves and the disease. The problem is that the very people who are running away are carrying the disease themselves! When they get a certain distance away from the origin of the disease they stop. Then, a few days later the disease breaks out there. That is the first ripple. Then the whole process starts all over again and the next ripple forms and then the next. Here, look at this overlay.”

  He pressed a button on the remote and a bright red undulating graph appeared showing a very high peak in the center of New York City that then dropped to zero on the outskirts of the city. It then went up again about ten miles away and then dropped a few miles further out. “When I first saw this effect I was reminded of the Airy function that is used in optics to describe the diffraction of light by a circular aperture.” He looked over at General Baker but he didn’t see any look of comprehension on the General’s face. “So,” he continued, “I thought I would try using that as a starting point in the computer coefficient regression process. I was able to get a very good fit for the New York data with seven eigenvalues.”

  “I don’t think I follow you exactly, Franklin.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so,” he said with a broad smile. “Anyway, the bottom line is that I have restructured your propagation model and made it work a lot better by getting rid of the Gaussian distribution propagation assumption.”

  “I see.”

  “Yeah. You know, all this disease data that has come in from the satellites has been really valuable. I mean; this is so cool!” Franklin was truly beaming. “I think we really have a model now that will serve us well in the future – I mean if we ever decide to weaponize Asian Fever.”

  General Baker looked at him again for several seconds. Then he said, “I see. That’s interesting. But tell me, Franklin, have you run the new propagation simulation to its ultimate conclusion? Do we know how far the disease will go?”

  Franklin smiled brightly, “Of course. I couldn’t resist. I’m sure you must know that!”

  “Yes,” General Baker returned a weak smile, “I do. What was the result?”

  ‘There’s no doubt the disease will sweep across the entire world and wipeout the human race – at least that part of it which does not enjoy the protection we do here.”

  “What about the ripples?” General Baker said, “the places in between the disease peaks? Won’t people survive there?”

  “Oh, sure - but only for a while. The simulation shows that eventually the ripples smooth out. That means the disease just spreads everywhere – so people die everywhere. It’s just simple math.”

  “So there’s no hope?”

  “What? Oh no! No, no, no, no, no! There is hope, but something must be done soon. My guess is within a week or two. We have to insert a new variable – something to perturb the equation. That’s all.”

  “What’s that?” General Baker asked.

  “Operation Clean Sweep,” he said with a self-satisfied smile, “You have to start it soon and take out the epicenters. I would guess probably the first and second ripples too. See, the epicenter and the first couple of ripples act as a source, a reservoir, of the disease. I ran this case too and the model predicts that if those are eliminated, the remaining population density is insufficient to support successful propagation.”

  “So that means…”

  “It means essentially that the disease will burn itself out in the rural areas if the main disease reservoirs are deleted from the equation.”

  “By using Clean Sweep – the nuclear cleansing option.” General Baker said quietly.

  “Yes,” Franklin said with a satisfied smile, “just delete the reservoirs.”

  Thirty-Four

  It was winter, as seasons were reckoned in Ireland, but it seemed to Dan that he had fallen asleep in the warm summer sun. He had closed his eyes and was lying on a bed of soft green grass on the gentle slope of a small hill that was sprinkled with blue and yellow wildflowers. He could smell the sweet fragrance of the flowers that floated on the breeze, the same breeze that was no
w lightly ruffling his hair. Perhaps I’ve fallen asleep on the edge of a fairy hill, he thought, and now I have fallen under their spell. I don’t know why the old stories warn us to beware of the fairies; this is so much more beautiful and peaceful than the real world. I could stay here forever…

  Then, unexpectedly, he felt a soft, smooth touch, a touch as light as a feather, on his lips. He smiled at the sensation and slowly opened his eyes and, there, just above him were the sparkling, laughing, emerald green eyes of a fairy princess. Her long hair touched his cheeks as she kissed him again.

  “Wake up, Dan” she said. “Wake up, my hero.” She kissed him again and laughed lightly at his bewilderment. He blinked in the bright sunshine, unable to take his eyes away from hers.

  “Sheila?” he said, not really sure if he was awake or still dreaming.

  “Come on, Dan,” Sheila said, laughing again. “Wake up! It’s almost nine o’clock!” She sat up straight now on their bed, and Dan could see that she was naked in the warm rays of the sun that shone through the window and seemed to lovingly caress her youthful body. Dan smiled back at her as he rubbed his eyes.

  “Good morning, Sheila,” he said. “I had the best dream…”

  Sheila smiled mischievously at him. “Are you sure it was a dream?” she asked and then she got up and walked over to the dresser to put on a pair of panties and jeans. “I’ll have the coffee ready in a few minutes,” she said as she pulled on an over-large, gray and blue, sweatshirt. “Would you like the full Irish too?”

  “I think I already had it,” Dan replied with a laugh, “or maybe it was just a dream.”

  Sheila laughed and said, “Oh, I think that must have been a dream, Dan. I’ll just make you a big breakfast. I think you need some energy after your dreams!” She closed the door and went into the kitchen while Dan slowly stretched and then got out of bed. Five minutes later Dan sat down at the table.

  “You just missed Brendan,” she said to him, “He said he was going to meet with one of the other pharmaceutical companies for an hour or so to go over some of the vaccine production details. I don’t think he needs us to help him there.”