Everything is a part of God’s plan, Harriet reminded herself.
But even her usual mantra did little to console her about losing her ability to taste sushi, especially considering that simulating taste and smell also happened to be the one thing the farming sims were horrible at.
As she’d undergone training session after training session inside the sims, she’d daydreamed constantly about arriving on Imago and finally being able to taste sushi again. Yet here she was, beset by a bug that prevented it.
It’s affecting everyone, she told herself. We’re lucky to even be alive.
That made logical sense, but it still didn’t do very much for her. She hoped to find a cure soon, but there was always another, more urgent virus that demanded her attention.
At least the weather was warm today, and the restaurateurs had invited customers to eat on the back patio. Nearly everyone had taken them up on that offer.
Harriet closed her eyes and used her chopsticks to deposit a California roll onto her tongue. She chewed slowly, trying to remember how it should have tasted.
It wasn’t working.
She opened her eyes to behold Philip Mann, who was staring at her wearing a blank expression.
Clearing her throat, Harriet dabbed at her lips with a cloth napkin. “How is work?” she asked.
“Work is fine,” Philip said. “It’s easy to maintain security when the colonists are so pleasant. And the wildlife gives us very little trouble.”
Harriet nodded. “What about Captain Gregory? I hear he’s become a bit moody since we arrived. Can’t be much of a treat to work under him, when he’s acting like that.”
“The captain is adjusting to planet life. Before this, he was almost always on a ship, running supplies for the First Contact Federation. He misses his old life.”
“Right,” she said, repressing a sigh. “He has had nearly two years to adjust, of course.” That came out more sardonic than she’d meant it to. Philip’s voice was starting to grate on her, which wasn’t a good sign for a first date. There was nothing wrong with his voice, not really—it just didn’t carry much energy.
It’s nothing like the way he speaks to me in my dreams.
“How is your sister?” Philip asked, apparently unaffected by the tone of her last remark.
“Recovering.” Soon after emerging from her cryo-tube, Sabrina Vaughn had resumed what had been a worrying drinking habit, which on Imago quickly became a ferocious one. Two weeks ago, her liver had finally given up the ghost, and only an emergency operation to install a hastily fabbed liver had saved her.
“What is her state of mind?”
“Bleak.” Kind of like mine right now.
“How does that make you feel?”
Harriet eased the pressure on her chopsticks, allowing the spicy tuna roll they held to tumble back onto her plate. She was about to excuse herself from dinner altogether, claiming the sudden onset of a bad headache, when her com saved her from having to.
It buzzed, and she took it out to read the message.
“Oh,” she said, almost dropping the com as she read the text displayed on its screen. “I’m sorry, Philip, I have to go into the lab.”
“I understand,” Philip said. “I hope you’ll join me again for dinner sometime.”
For a moment, she stared at his tanned face, with its strong chin and ice-blue eyes. A lot of women probably would have put up with a bland personality to have someone who looked as good as Philip Mann.
Not Harriet. In fact, her interest in him surprised her—she’d always been interested in far more imperfect men.
Imperfect physically, at least. In her experience, good looks were inversely proportional to good personalities. Every man she’d dated before had been a beautiful person, internally, and even though it hadn’t worked out, she looked back on each of them fondly.
A relationship with Philip would never work. He didn’t seem to have any substance to speak of…any depth.
If she was to find love on Imago, it would need to be someone with enough emotional depth to appreciate what she went through at work—to commiserate, and to understand.
Philip wasn’t that man, which was something the message she’d received had sharply reminded her of.
It was from her assistant, Mariah, and it read, “We need to get into the lab, pronto. Al Pickton just dropped dead, and no one has any idea what caused it.”
*
When she arrived at the lab, Al Pickton was lying naked on the steel examination table, and Mariah had already prepped him for autopsy.
“Are you okay?” Harriet asked her assistant, whose eyes were rimmed with red.
“Yeah. I’m all right,” she said, sniffing. Last year, Mariah had dated Al Pickton for a month or so.
Mariah Casey was nine years younger than Harriet, and smart as a whip. Unlike Harriet, she never seemed to suffer from a shortage of men to interest her—but only for a very brief time.
She burned through men like a wildfire, and her love life was characterized by passionate trysts which she seemed to forget about almost as soon as they ended.
Sometimes, Harriet wished she could be more like Mariah. Mostly, she thanked God that she wasn’t.
Her theory was that Mariah grew bored of men quickly because so few of them came anywhere close to matching her intellectually.
Mariah took care of everything technical in the lab, which was good, because Harriet was essentially clueless on that front. And technology was very important to what they were doing. Although AI had never progressed much beyond the advanced deep learning of the twenty-first century, the AI that humanity had managed to develop was central to Harriet’s work as a virologist. One of her most important tools was the ability to simulate populations who were suffering from the symptoms of whatever virus was plaguing the colonists of Imago this week.
Once Mariah set up a given simulation according to Harriet’s specifications, she fed all of its data to ViroBuddy, which was the hokey name that had been given to the neural network that most excelled at classifying viruses. It found the closest Earth-based analog in its database, and it extrapolated potential cures based on whatever was used to cure the Earth virus that came closest to the Imago virus they were studying.
Using this technique, Harriet and Mariah had managed to relieve their fellow colonists of all sorts of nasty conditions, from angry cone-shaped warts that sprouted all over the face to a fast-spreading rash which rendered everyday activities incredibly uncomfortable.
But as they ran diagnostics on samples they took from Al Pickton, Harriet became less and less sure that they’d be able to repeat the feat this time. In fact, there was a decent chance that the little experiment that humanity had begun on Imago was about to come to an abrupt end.
Finally, after hours of work, Harriet said out loud what they both had to be thinking: “This is Imagovirus, isn’t it?”
Mariah nodded. “Sure looks like it.” They had no cure for Imagovirus. Which, until today, had only been a mild annoyance.
Now, it had morphed into an existential crisis for everyone in the colony. Over the years since arrival, ViroBuddy had spent many hours studying Imagovirus and suggesting treatments, but nothing it recommended had worked.
Al Pickton had died from a complete shutdown of his lungs, heart, liver, and kidneys. The failures had happened with such rapidity that it was hard to tell which organ had given out first.
Harriet rubbed her eyes, behind which a headache was forming—one much realer than the one she’d been about to pretend to Philip. “The scary thing is that the virus doesn’t seem like it’s mutated at all, which means it’s had this capacity all along. For months, it causes only flu-like symptoms, when suddenly…”
“This.”
“Yeah,” Harriet said, with a long, ragged sigh.
“But it doesn’t make much sense, does it?” Mariah said. “A virus that kills its host so quickly isn’t a very successful virus. How can that help its life cycle? If i
t kills everyone on Imago, where does it go next?”
Harriet pressed her lips together. “That’s something we’ll need to find out. Fast.”
*
The very next day, Rudolph Green followed Al Pickton in keeling over without any warning.
Except Green didn’t die right away. Only his lungs had given out, and a pair of paramedics who’d happened to be operating in the area had managed to get him on a ventilator before he suffocated. Harriet was notified immediately, and she rushed to the hospital to see Rudolph.
By the time she got there, he was already dead. Her shoulders slumped when the receptionist gave her the news.
“Do you want to examine him now, Ms. Vaughn?” the receptionist asked. “Or should I have him brought to your lab?”
Well, I can definitely stop rushing to see him. Interviewing Green while he’d still been alive had been the truly promising prospect. Still, studying him so soon after death could yield something. “I’ll see him now.”
She collected all the data she could from Green, and then she requested that his body be brought to her lab and placed in the refrigeration unit there.
On the way out of the hospital, Harriet ran into Theodore Yates in the hallway. She caught him by the wrist as he attempted to sidle past her in the corridor, avoiding eye contact.
“Theo. Were you visiting Sabrina?” Theo had dated Harriet’s sister for a couple months after the Delphi had arrived at Imago, and he still kept close tabs on Sabrina. He was a creep, in Harriet’s opinion.
“Uh…” Theo cleared his throat, his eyes darting.
“You did something for her, didn’t you?”
He sniffed.
“You tweaked her sim,” Harriet said. It wasn’t a question. While Theo had a reputation for being a careless jerk, he was Imago’s resident expert on the history sims, which made him the de facto expert on the farming sims.
“She wanted the alcohol to have a stronger effect,” he rasped at last. “I see it as progress, Harriet. Simulated livers don’t give out.”
“I see it as enabling. Don’t tweak her sim again until you check with me first. Do you understand me?”
“I understand that you can piss off,” he said, apparently having found his guts somewhere. With that, he stormed toward the hospital’s main entrance.
Harriet glared at his retreating back. It never failed to amaze her how much gall Theo Yates could muster sometimes. He certainly didn’t have a good reason for having any self-confidence.
He’s a toothpick-shaped coward. And mostly, he acted like one, though every now and then a wave of superiority would wash over him, and for the rest of the conversation it was like he’d suddenly remembered he was secretly God Emperor of the Universe.
She found Sabrina awake, her eyes rimmed with redness, probably from crying.
“I want you to get Theo to reverse what he did to your sim,” Harriet said.
“Hello to you too,” Sabrina answered, grimacing.
“Did you hear what I just said?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
Her sister smiled, though the expression didn’t contain an ounce of happiness. “You can shove your ultimatums up your ass. You don’t rule me, Harriet. You don’t make the law. I’m allowed to do anything I want with my sim.”
“He’s enabling you. After enough simulated booze, you’ll want the real stuff again. I know you, Sabrina. Way better than he does.”
“You don’t know me at all.”
Harriet glared at her sister for a moment, before she managed to rein in her emotions. This isn’t getting us anywhere. She drew a breath and took the seat next to the bed, trying not to let her shoulders slump again.
“Maybe you’re right,” Harriet said, her voice much softer. “Maybe I don’t know you.”
“You don’t.”
“Why are you like this, Sabrina? Why can’t you make the most of what we’ve been given here?”
“What have we been given?”
“A chance,” Harriet said. “A fresh start.”
“And who gave that to us? God?”
Harriet inclined her head. “All gifts come from God.”
“Bullshit. The war gave us this, Harriet. And in exchange, it took Earth, along with everyone we knew.”
Slowly, Harriet shook her head. “Our friends are probably still alive out there. They were all assigned to colony ships. We saw a lot of them off ourselves, didn’t we? And Cathy and Brian saw us off.”
“The most important word you just used is probably. We don’t actually know, do we? And we may never know. That’s just it. We’re separated by so much distance that no one will know if something catastrophic happens. Not until it’s way too late, anyway. We’ve been scattered across tens of thousands of light years. We went from having the net—from being able to contact anyone we wanted instantly—to this. We might as well be a different species from our friends, now. Future generations probably will belong to different species, for all intents and purposes. If they survive.”
Harriet’s gaze drifted from Sabrina’s to settle on the blank hospital wall, oppressive in its sterile whiteness.
“The sims are what I have to get by, now,” her sister went on. “I know I can’t drink in real life anymore. I know it was an atrocious waste of the fabber, to replace a liver because I couldn’t stop myself. So I’m going to keep drinking in the sims, Harriet. It’s all I have.”
“I get it,” Harriet said.
With that, she stood and left the room.
As was usually the case, her conversation with Sabrina had left her feeling depressed. But it had also given her an idea. If Sabrina could tweak her sim, what was stopping Harriet from tweaking her dreams?
Harriet considered herself deeply religious, and she’d always been fascinated by passages from the Bible that depicted God’s use of dreams to communicate important messages to his followers.
God told Jacob that Jesus was the gate to heaven. He showed Joseph the future. He promised Solomon wisdom and power…
Why couldn’t he use a dream to lend Harriet guidance about what she should do about Imagovirus?
In one sense, it seemed crazy, and it would probably sound crazy to anyone to whom she said it loud. But Harriet was getting desperate, and she had always believed that God watched out for his children, especially in times of crisis. To Harriet, humanity’s attempts to survive out here in the cold reaches of space definitely qualified as a time of crisis.
She had a passing interest in lucid dreaming, and she knew it was possible to train yourself to have them regularly. But the increased control and retention that came with lucid dreaming had never been quite enough to motivate her to learn how to do it.
Now, she was motivated. With lucid dreaming, she could lend structure to her recurring dream, and in it, she could do whatever she willed.
Yes, a part of her longed to kiss the version of Philip who existed only in her dreams, and to feel his arms around her. But even more, she wanted to remember what they spoke about when she woke up.
God is giving me these dreams for a reason.
She planned to find out what that reason was.
*
Between seeking a cure for Imagovirus and teaching herself to lucid dream, Harriet’s every waking moment was full.
In the lab, she and Mariah did manage to hit upon a plausible life cycle for Imagovirus. It seemed that its strategy was to kill off an entire population and then go dormant, except that the virus persisted even after it killed its host. It survived in a sort of stasis, much as humans did inside cryo-tubes.
Over the ensuing years, the host’s body biodegraded, and the virus remained in the earth, to eventually be taken up by plants through their roots. Once that happened, the plants themselves became infected, and so did whatever animal ate the plants.
That ingestion by animals was also when Imagovirus did its mutating, which it did rapidly, over and over, until it hit upon a form that allowed it to spread qu
ickly through the population of whatever species it had infected.
At first, the virus caused only flu-like symptoms. Then, suddenly…
Death.
The life cycle of Imagovirus was one of death, and it explained why the planet’s animal population was so sparse. Harriet had no idea when the virus had first evolved, but it represented a slow-moving apocalypse for all macroscopic life on Imago.
Discovering Imagovirus’ life cycle ended up doing nothing for their efforts to find a cure. More and more people died, and Harriet and Mariah remained powerless to stop it, despite the increasingly early mornings and late nights they were putting in at the lab.
Luckily, Harriet quickly found that the techniques she used to train herself to lucid dream could be fit fairly easily into even the busiest of lives.
Imago’s net archives had all the information she needed. Each colony ship had been given a compressed download of almost the entirety of Earth’s net—a repository of virtually all human knowledge, sent into the stars in hundreds of directions.
To begin, Harriet started a dream journal, and each morning after waking she spent five minutes scribbling her dreams inside it. This was a technique meant to increase her dream retention. It began to work within a week, which made her marvel at the fact that she’d never managed to keep a dream journal before.
If I’d known it had been this easy…
Another technique involved checking to see whether she still had the ability to affect a room’s light levels. It was next to impossible to adjust the light level in a dream, and so the moment she tried a switch and it didn’t work, she’d know she was dreaming.
Whenever she entered or exited a room now, she hit the light switches to make sure they were still working. That had the potential to cause some social friction, which became clear when she went to her dentist for a checkup. The occupants of the waiting room immediately voiced their displeasure at what she’d done, loudly, and she was warned not to do it again on her way out.
She managed to restrain herself, but only barely. For full effectiveness, she figured it was important to test the lights in every room. That way, she would start to do so whenever she dreamed, too.
Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four) Page 10