by Craig Nova
He went down the hall, and as he went, he thought, The problem is always the same. It’s not what we know that can cause trouble. The problem is what we don’t know. The unintended surprise.
Briggs had gotten through some hard times, and he had done so because he had learned one of the hardest lessons of all, which was to keep his mouth shut. But if they had asked him how Kay and Jack were vulnerable, what would he have said? It was possible, he supposed, that some bacteria or perhaps a virus, like equine encephalitis, might kill them, but another dynamic would probably come into play. Since they hadn’t been exposed to childhood diseases, the part of the immune system that had historically dealt with parasites would have been stimulated. This reaction would have made them susceptible to asthma, allergies, anaphylaxsis. Anyway, that’s what Briggs thought was most likely, even though they still might be carrying something new.
BOOK III
CHAPTER 1
March 26, 2029
BRIGGS CAME down the hall from the meeting with Mashita and Krupp and started to clean out his office. He hoped a security guard wouldn’t come in to make sure he took only personal items, and since there wasn’t one there yet, Briggs started to pack as quickly as possible. But even as he put his manuals and catalogs into a box, he kept touching the tube he had in his pocket. It was filled with fluid from Kay’s platform, and he ran his fingers over it again and again to make sure it was there. He was most concerned about the possibility that Kay and Jack could be carrying a disease, a virus or bacteria that had secretly undergone the same process of in silica natural selection that Kay and Jack had gone through. And of course it might not be just one, but two or more that operated together, synergistically, a benign bacteria, or a seemingly benign one, operating on another seemingly benign one to produce a new medical condition. Briggs wasn’t sure what he should be looking for, but he thought he would recognize it when he saw it. A new bacteria or virus, whatever it was, only had to find a way to placate the rules for natural selection that Briggs’s program had set up. After all, that was what life had been doing for billions of years. Why should it suddenly stop?
Briggs still had a pass that worked for the machines downstairs at Galapagos, but word would get around fast that he had been transferred, and soon his account wasn’t going to work there anymore. When he had cleaned up his office, he touched the tube in his pocket again, the glass surface so warm as to feel almost alive. When he held it in his fist, the tube gave him the sensation that his difficulties had become concrete. He put the last of his manuals into a box, and then stood there with the tube in his hand.
His footsteps echoed in the stairwell as he descended into the depths of the building, where, at the bottom, he heard the hum of the machines and smelled the familiar dry-ice odor. Doors of a cheerful color, salmon, rose, or yellow, were spaced every thirty feet, and he opened one that was the color of a grape Popsicle.
Two technicians sat at a monitor.
“This looks like one of God’s mistakes,” one of them said. He pointed at the images on the screen.
“Yeah,” said the other. “I guess. But it wasn’t God. It was that jackass from MIT. What’s his name? The one with the fat girlfriend.”
“Colby?” said the first.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” said the other.
“You know, this reminds me of what they say in Alabama when something goes wrong.”
“What’s that?” said the other.
“Thank God for Mississippi. It’s even worse there.”
The technicians glanced up, saw Briggs, glanced down. Briggs went up to the machine that he was looking for, put a syringe into the sample he took from his pocket, and injected the lymph fluid into the rubber opening for this purpose. It made a little squeak when he put the needle in. Then he started a complete workup, not only for viruses and bacteria that were known, but for any genetic irregularity. Some of the work had to be done mechanically, which meant an actual culture, and that took time. Anyway, he would be able to keep track of it from wherever he was, or at least as long as his computer account was still valid.
The technicians looked over. One of them said, “You’ve got to sign in.”
“Later,” said Briggs. “Got a meeting.”
They both looked at him as he went out, their eyes showing a blankness that was nonetheless ominous. He stood outside and put his head against the wall. He hadn’t used all of the fluid, and he guessed the best place to keep the rest was in a refrigerator someplace, not here, not in the building, but at home. He reached down and touched the tube in his pocket, as though the thing were a medicine bottle, perhaps containing tranquilizers that he really didn’t want to be without.
BRIGGS’S NEW job was on a commercial strip in one of the prefabricated buildings that had been put up quickly, and the geography was a sure sign that the company wanted him out of the way but still available. He couldn’t tell whether or not he was reassured or alarmed by the one obvious fact of this neighborhood. Here, nothing lasted.
The building had a glass door in front, a directory behind glass, a stairwell in which some plants were growing. He stopped to look at the leaves of a plant, which were coarse and without any shine to them, and as he touched them it was as though he could feel the desolation of this place, where no one wanted to come and from which everyone was trying to get away. When he looked out the glass of the front door, he could see the rolls of razor wire, like misery itself, on top of the chain-link fences.
Mostly what they made here were souvenirs for the tourist trade, pornographic tricks, cheap illusions of one sort or another, minor animals, pets with a short half-life. His office was at the back on the second floor, at the end of a hall lined with gray metal shelves. It looked to him like a boneyard where machines were stacked that were too expensive to throw away, but were too costly to fix. He stopped here and there to see just what there was. He guessed he could work with some of it—that is, if he took the machines home at night and did the maintenance himself. This meant calling around to get some parts, and perhaps there were some people who hadn’t heard about his demotion and who would still talk to him, but he knew this was just a dream: people that stupid didn’t last long.
The first thing was to clean up the place where he was going to work. The machine on his desk was not so bad. He turned on the light and looked at the walls. Numbers had been written here and there, and part of a sentence that began, “Please, O Lord, in thy mercy . . . ”
The first projects were pretty straightforward souvenirs, just like the junk he had done right out of school. He guessed he was in limbo, or was it purgatory? What was the difference between the two? The essence of both, he supposed, was that nothing was final yet, like the time a prisoner spent between conviction and sentence. Surely there must be a word for such a state. How about living without gravity? That was what it was like, since he had to fight to keep his feet on the ground, or to stop himself from simply vanishing into the air around him, as though he were nothing more than smoke. Then he thought, Stop it. Stop it.
He tried to log onto his old account at Galapagos. The prompt came up, and he put in his password and username, then he put his hand on the small screen at the side of the keyboard which read his fingerprints. The machine did its registration, and Briggs wondered what would happen if he couldn’t keep track of the analysis he had started for the fluid. The machine made a little grinding sound. He was in. He scrolled through the partial results, seeing the lists of proteins and amino acids, although he didn’t have a manual for the shape of each of the proteins. They could be folded a number of ways, and, of course, how they were pleated or bent determined the effect each had. The hard tests, the ones done in actual dishes with growing media, were just getting started, although he could tell that something was growing. He looked at the stains in the growing medium that showed up on his monitor. Just like mold on wallpaper. Or a small green spore on bread.
Briggs turned to the wall where the words said, “Please, O
Lord, in thy mercy . . . ” He supposed it was possible that he would find a disease no one had anticipated. How would he tell Mashita about it, or Krupp, when they were trying to pretend they didn’t know anything about what he had done? If he discovered something, it would be precisely the news they didn’t want to hear. This was a time when no one wanted things to go wrong, and that was, of course, when such things happened, just when everyone was most vulnerable. He knew about vulnerability, and he thought of the years when he had experienced it like a bruise that was still tender to the touch.
When a new car pulled up in front of this building, Briggs wondered if he had been sent for. Or when he saw a man at the end of a block, taking his measure, he wondered if a decision had been made. Then he tried to comfort himself by thinking that if they had decided to get rid of him, he’d have no warning. Was that right? Or would they play with him?
After work he stopped in the park by the river, which was swollen and dark brown with snow melt, and one afternoon there had been some freezing rain and the benches were covered with ice, like some grotesque dessert, some sugar-coated monstrosity.
Missing Kay and Jack, he assumed, was just sentimentality. After all, he had had to forget things many times before, and he knew how to do it. Change your routine. Realize that there isn’t much to be done. Cut your losses. He tried to sing, “I’ll be around to pick up the pieces . . . ” Well, funny or not, wasn’t this what he had to do? It was the grown-up course of action. He was like a divorced man who was reminded of his wife’s departure again and again by opening a closet door to find her clothes gone, and nothing left but the scent of her perfume and her sweat. He could almost hear the infinitely sad ting of wire coat hangers knocking up against one another in such a closet.
When he tried to see where he stood, he was convinced that the silence was a bad sign. It wasn’t noticeable at first, just the fact that no one called him and that there was no message from Krupp or Mashita. He hadn’t thought that they would contact him right away, but still, as the days went by, he hoped that there would be some word. He knew that new projects came across their desks every day of the week, just as he knew, too, that there were few men or women who could do the code the way he did. For instance, there were effects he could produce simply by the use of style or by invoking beauty, by the fact that he had a coherent vision of what the model should look like at the end. Either you could do it or you couldn’t. He wondered what kind of cheap imitation of him they were hiring.
But the really keen moment was when he woke at three o’clock in the morning and didn’t know where Kay and Jack were. That was the trap of the personal. Once you started with it, you couldn’t simply forget about it, since this was like forgetting yourself.
He painted his office, but he didn’t white out the line that said, in a shaky hand, “Please, O Lord, in thy mercy . . . ” He thought of it when he saw two obvious torpedoes, just gangsters, who came down the street toward the building where he stood behind the glass door, watching them. Briggs stood in the lobby, smelling the cheap odor of the plant that sat by the stairwell. He looked out the window. Were they coming in or not? And if they did, what would he do? Argue with them?
The men walked along next to the cars parked at the side of the street. One of them tried a door handle. The other shrugged. Then the two of them looked around like two predators who were trying to decide whether the chase was worth the joy of the kill. Just car thieves, Briggs guessed. Or was it hoped? This was the problem of trying to think clearly when he was scared: What was he really doing, thinking or just trying to reassure himself, and how could he tell the difference? Well, he knew that the first thing he was going to do was calm down. Surely that would help. He guessed. Shit.
But these things were just on the surface, the silence and people looking at cars, just the most minor varieties of fear. The real one came at night when he was in his bed, the sheets somehow uncomfortable, either too hot or too cold or damp. The clock sat on her bench, legs crossed, hands on her thighs. He stared at the ceiling, hearing the sound of her breathing, which was a little throaty. It was reassuring to hear it, and made him feel needed. As he listened, he thought, Maybe Mashita and Krupp are just putting me through this so that when the time comes I will be more ready to crack, that I will hold nothing back.
That was one step down. The next one was that he was getting shaky because they wanted him to get this way, and that they knew how it worked. For instance, they knew he would figure out that they were letting him twist slowly in the wind, just as they knew that when he discovered this, it would only make him feel worse. When he thought this, he said, “Well, maybe they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.”
It made him feel better for a few minutes, but the real step down was this: He had given of himself to Kay, and he wasn’t alive so much in one place as in two places, and if anything happened to her, why, then something would have happened to him, too. The clock sat there, breathing, ah-huh, ah-huh, ah-huh.
What would happen if they just disappeared? How would he feel then? His sense of love seemed to blend perfectly with his sense of terror, and it was right there at the boundary that he hung, like a hawk in the updraft of a thermal. Warm air as love. Gravity as terror. He hung there, thinking about Kay. Or about the risks of love. And friendship.
He had a different attachment to each of them. Jack was a friend, a man you could trust down to your last shot. And it wasn’t just the physical bravery that one could depend upon, not the fact that he was smart enough not to make too many mistakes, but something else altogether, which was, for lack of a better term, spiritual strength. He was someone who could look into the terror that Briggs felt tonight, into that profound sense of exposure and the possibilities of malice and, while nodding in agreement about the scale of it and the danger of it, would also have the strength to say, “Yes. So what do we do now? We aren’t going to cave in, are we? Either we take our courage with both hands or we are going to die.”
He said, “Kay . . . ” Then he looked around into the dark. He was pretty sure no one could hear, but these days it was hard to tell for sure. This entire process was familiar: the worse he felt, the more he tried to think of her, and as he did, the more he realized how distant she was.
He knew that she missed him too. But if she did, then why didn’t she contact him? The clock’s breathing came regularly, quietly, like that of a child who has a cold. Around six, the light came in from the cracks around the window, a gray dimness that appeared in long triangles across the ceiling. He thought the answer might be in the fact that she suspected his apartment was being watched, and that if she showed up here, she might be caught before she could even knock on the door. He wasn’t certain she could come to this place safely, so why should she even try? For an instant he clung to the thin intimacy that they might both be thinking this same thing.
He rolled over, hearing the stale rustle of the sheets. He looked into the dark, facing away from the clock.
Of course, Kay had a cue, too. Hers was in Jack’s action. After Jack did his job, she’d get rid of him. But there was yet another cue that Briggs had written in. He had thought about this for a long time.
Originally, if the project had run its natural course, the Committee on Evaluations would have seen Kay and Jack. Where had the money gone, after all? Briggs didn’t want to be at the demonstration and to have her take one look at him and have her . . . recognize him. Of course, she’d try to talk to him, and, God knew, he wanted to talk to her.
Anyway, he hadn’t wanted her to see him and to have her feelings unleashed just like that, in front of the people who were there to see a demonstration. In front of strangers. He wasn’t sure what she would do when she recognized him, but he knew it wasn’t going to be tolerated by the Committee on Evaluations, brought in by Mashita. Who knew what they would do to her? Perhaps she would catch sight of him through the transparent steel of the room where the committee sat, watching. Maybe she would come up to it, looking
at him with a frank urgency. Maybe she would tap against it, desperately trying to get his attention. What was he going to do, pretend that he didn’t know her, or that he didn’t have a clue what she meant? Sometimes, late at night, he could hear that tapping.
When he was in the midst of adding things, he thought, How dare you? How can you do anything to her? Leave her alone. Why can’t you just leave her alone? Everything you are doing is going to get the both of you killed.
Just as he thought, if any human being could make the person he loved, love him, what would he do? No flinching now. What would you do, if you could make the person you loved, love you?
Also, as he did this work, he had his doubts about whether anyone was capable of Kay’s passionate devotion, and if anyone was, he wasn’t sure she would want to be. He thought that both of them would be safer if Kay’s love for him came into existence on the basis of a cue. Maybe he would set it up so that after he explained what the cue was and what it would do, she could decide whether or not to use it. It would be her decision. He would say to her, “Would you like to know what it is like to love someone more than life? Here. I will give you the power to know. You decide.” It would be like Eden, only he would be the one to offer her the apple and to let her decide what to do with it.
Anyway, that was what the original idea had been.
So he had started thinking about what the cue would be. He decided that it wouldn’t be something bland or bureaucratic, like Pi-16-A, like a defined variable in code, but more private. He had begun with the lists of flowers, of orchids, and he had looked at the plates of thousand of species, the petals of them pink or red, some sprayed with moisture, others speckled with the most miraculous patterns, as though the order of things were visible right here. Well, he had decided to go with the name of an orchid. Phalaenopsis was the variety he chose, and the specific flower was a hybrid called “Sweet Memory.” Phalaenopsis was the cue, and the name of the hybrid, Deventeriana X violacea, was the safety. All three would have to be used together. How could anything go wrong with that?