Levine had known details about X-FLU that even the nosy bastard Teece, the investigator, couldn’t have learned until arriving at Mount Dragon. Levine had aired his dirt on the Sammy Sanchez show while Teece was still nosing around in New Mexico. And there were no standard long-distance lines out of Mount Dragon. Scopes knew that the only communications out of Mount Dragon were across the GeneDyne net. He knew it, because he had seen to it himself.
That meant Levine must not only have obtained his information from a source within GeneDyne—he must have obtained it from a source within Mount Dragon. And that meant Levine had gained unprecedented access to GeneDyne cyberspace.
Once inside the GeneDyne net, Scopes worked silently and intently. Within minutes, he was within a region that he and he alone had access to. Here, his finger was on the pulse of the entire organization: terabytes of data covering every word of every project, e-mail, program file, and on-line chat generated by GeneDyne employees over the last twenty-four hours. With the click of a few more keys, Scopes moved through his personal region of the network to a dedicated server containing a single massive application, which he had called, whimsically, Cypherspace.
Slowly, a strange landscape materialized on his small computer screen. It was like no landscape on earth, and too complex and symmetrical to have been conceived solely by a human mind. This was the virtual landscape of GeneDyne cyberspace. The Cypherspace application used direct links into the GeneDyne operating system to transform datastreams, memory contents, and all active processes into shapes, surfaces, shadows, and sounds. A strange sighing sound, like sustained musical notes, vibrated from the laptop’s speaker. To a layman such a landscape would appear surreal and bizarre, but to Scopes, who loved to wander through this strange junglescape late at night, it was as familiar as the backyard of his childhood.
Scopes wandered through the landscape, looking, listening, watching. For a moment, he was tempted to go to a special place in this landscape—a secret among secrets—but he realized there was no time.
Suddenly Scopes sat up and breathed out. In the landscape, there was something that was not right. It was a thread, invisible of itself, manifest only by what it obscured. As Scopes crossed the invisible thread, the strange music dropped to silence. It was a tunnel of nothing, an absence of data, a black hole in cyberspace. Scopes knew what it must be: a hidden data channel, visible only because it had been hidden a little too well. Whoever had programmed this back channel was transcendentally clever. It couldn’t have been Levine. Levine was brilliant, but Scopes knew that Levine’s computer abilities had always been his weakest suit.
Levine had help.
Accessing his bag of digital tricks, Scopes selected a transparent relay, readying it for insertion in the channel. Then, slowly, with infinite care, he began to follow the thread, twisting and turning in its mazy path, losing it, picking it up again, working methodically back toward its hidden target.
Carson found de Vaca at work in Lab C. She had a small flask of PurBlood, still smoking from the deep freeze, sitting on the bioprophylaxis table.
“You’ve been gone for eight hours,” came her voice over the private channel. “What, did they fly you to Boston for your awards ceremony?”
Carson moved toward his stool and sat down numbly. “I was in the library archives,” he replied.
De Vaca swiveled her computer screen toward him. “Take a look at this.”
Carson sat still for a long moment. Finally, he turned toward the screen. More than anything, he did not want to know what de Vaca might have discovered.
On her screen were two images of phospholipid capsules, side by side. One was smooth and perfect. The other was ragged, full of ugly holes and tears where molecules had obviously been displaced from their normal order.
“The first image shows an unfiltered PurBlood ‘cell.’ This second image shows what happens to PurBlood after it passes through the GEF filtration.” The excitement in de Vaca’s voice was clear even through the speaker in Carson’s headset. Mistaking his silence for disbelief, she continued. “Listen. You remember how PurBlood is made. Once the hemoglobin has been encapsulated, it has to be purified of all manufacturing by-products and any toxins produced by the bacteria. So they used Burt’s GEF filtration on the hemoglobin to—”
De Vaca stopped, looking at Carson. He had positioned himself between her and the lab’s video camera, blocking its view. He was moving his gloved hands downward in a suppressing motion. Through the visor, she could see him shaking his head and silently mouthing the word stop.
De Vaca frowned. “What’s up?” she asked. “Been chewing peyote buttons, cabrón?”
Carson brusquely motioned her to wait. Then he looked around the lab as if searching for something. Suddenly he reached for a cabinet, pulled out a large vial of disinfectant powder, and sprinkled a light dusting of it on the glass surface of the bioprophylaxis table. Shielding his actions from the camera, he formed letters in the white dust with a gloved finger:
Don’t use intercom.
De Vaca stared at the words for a moment. Then, extending a gloved finger, she formed a large question mark in the powder.
Tell me the rest HERE, Carson wrote.
De Vaca paused, looking narrowly at Carson. Then she wrote out the message: PurBlood contaminated by GEF filtration. Burt used himself as alpha tester. That’s what’s wrong with him.
Carson quickly smoothed out the message and sprinkled a little more disinfectant on the surface. He quickly wrote: THINK. If Burt was alpha tester, who were the beta testers?
He saw a look of fear spread slowly across her face. She was mouthing words but he could not hear them.
He wrote: Library. Half hour. After waiting for her to nod agreement, he erased the tracings with a sweep of his glove.
The Mount Dragon library was an oasis of rusticity in a high-tech desert: its yellow, gingham-checked curtains, rough-hewn roof beams, and coarse floorboards were designed to resemble an oversized Western lodge. The intent of the designers had been to provide relief from the sterile white corridors of the rest of the facility. However, given the moratorium on paper products at Mount Dragon, the library contained mostly electronic resources, and in any case few members of the overworked Mount Dragon staff had time to enjoy its solitude. Carson himself had only been in the library twice before: once when poking around the facility during his initial explorations, and again just a few hours before, immediately after leaving Singer and Nye to themselves.
As he closed the heavy door behind him, he was glad to see that de Vaca was the library’s only occupant. She was sitting in a white Adirondack chair, dozing despite herself, long black hair fallen carelessly across her face. She looked up at his approach.
“Long day,” she said. “And long night.” She looked at him speculatively. “They’re going to wonder why we left the Fever Tank early,” she added in a lower tone.
“They would have wondered a lot more if I’d let you keep running your mouth,” Carson muttered back.
“Hell, and I thought I was paranoid. You really think somebody listens to all those monitor tapes, cabrón?”
Carson gave a short shake of the head. “We can’t take that chance.”
De Vaca stiffened slightly. “Don’t pull a Vanderwagon on me, Carson. Now, what’s this about beta testers for PurBlood?”
“I’ll show you.” He motioned her over to a data terminal in a far corner of the library. Pulling up two chairs, he put the terminal’s keyboard on his lap, entering his employee ID at the waiting prompt.
“What research have you done on PurBlood since you got here?” he asked, turning to her.
De Vaca shrugged. “Not much. The later lab reports of Burt’s. Why?”
Carson nodded. “Exactly. The same kind of materials I examined: sample runs, lab notes Burt made while he was transferring his attention to X-FLU. The only reason we were interested in PurBlood at all was because Burt had worked on it prior to getting involved with our own proj
ect, X-FLU.”
He punched keys. “I did see Singer this morning. But I didn’t really speak with him. I came here instead. I remembered what you’d said about PurBlood, and I wanted to learn a little more about its development. Look what I found.”
He gestured at the screen:
mol_desc_one
vcf
10,240,342
11/1/95
mol_desc_two
vcf
12,320,302
11/1/95
bipol_symmetr
vcf
41,234,913
12/14/95
hemocyl_grp_r
vcf
7,713,653
01/3/96
diffrac_series_a
vcf
21,442,521
02/5/96
diffrac_series_b
vcf
6,100,824
02/6/96
pr
vid
940,213,727
02/27/96
transfec_locus_h
vcf
18,921,663
03/10/96
“These are all the video files in the PurBlood research archives,” he went on in a low tone. “Most of them are the usual: animations of molecules and the like. But look at the second from the last on the list, the one called pr. Notice its extension: it’s a digital dump from a video camera, not the video compression format used in computer animations. And look at its huge size: almost a gigabyte.”
“What is it?” de Vaca asked.
“It’s a rough-cut video, unreleased, probably created for public-relations purposes.” With a few more keystrokes, he called up a multimedia software object to play back the video file. An image appeared in a window on the terminal screen, grainy but perfectly distinct.
“You’ll have to watch closely,” he said. “There’s no associated audio file.”
A caravan of Hummers is approaching across the desert. The camera zooms out briefly to show the Mount Dragon complex, the white buildings, the blue New Mexico sky.
The camera returns to the caravan, now parked at the Mount Dragon motor pool. The passenger door of the lead vehicle opens, and a man emerges. He stands on the tarmac, waving, grinning, and shaking hands.
“Scopes,” Carson murmured.
The entire Mount Dragon staff are on hand to greet him. There is much backslapping and grinning.
“Looks like a camp meeting,” said de Vaca. “Who’s that big-nosed guy standing next to Singer?”
“Burt,” Carson replied. “It’s Franklin Burt.”
Now Burt is standing next to Scopes on the tarmac, talking to the crowd. Scopes puts his arm around him, and they raise hands in a victory gesture. The camera pans across the crowd.
The scene shifts to the Mount Dragon gymnasium. It has been cleared of all equipment, and in the center are two rows of chairs, carefully arranged. They are occupied by what appears to be the entire Mount Dragon staff. The camera, positioned on the balcony running track, now focuses on a temporary stage built at one end of the gym. Scopes is giving a talk to the enthusiastic crowd.
As Scopes continues, the camera pans the crowd again. Several of the faces seem to have grown somber, even uncertain.
A nurse comes from offstage, dressed in white, wheeling a stretcher with an IV rack. The rack holds a single unit of blood.
Scopes sits on the edge of the stretcher and the nurse rolls up his left sleeve. Franklin Burt now mounts the stage and begins to talk passionately, moving back and forth across the stage.
The camera zooms in as the nurse swabs Scopes’s arm and slides in the IV. Then she hooks up the pint of blood and turns a plastic stopcock, starting the flow. While Scopes receives the blood, Burt talks to him, obviously monitoring his vital signs.
“Jesus Christ,” de Vaca said. “He’s getting PurBlood, isn’t he?”
The camera makes a few cuts and in a few minutes the pint of blood is empty. The nurse removes the IV, places a gauze patch on the arm, and folds the arm up to seal the vein.
Scopes stands with a grin and holds up his other arm in a victory salute.
The camera turns to the audience. Everyone is clapping; some enthusiastically, others with more reserve. One scientist stands up. Then another. Soon the group is giving Scopes a standing ovation. Another nurse comes onstage, wheeling two large IV racks, each holding two dozen or so pints of blood.
Nye strides up to the stage. He shakes Scopes’s hand and rolls up his left sleeve. The nurse inserts an IV into his arm and starts a unit of blood.
Another scientist comes forward, then a maintenance worker. Then Singer himself begins to approach the stage, and the audience breaks into another round of applause. The camera focuses on Singer’s plump face. It is white, and beads of sweat stand out on his brow. Yet he, too, sits down on a cot and rolls up his sleeve, and soon the blood is flowing into his veins.
After that, the audience stands in unison. Within moments, a line has formed from the stage, snaking back toward the rows of chairs.
“Look,” de Vaca whispered. “There’s Brandon-Smith. There’s Vanderwagon and Pavel what’s-his-name. And there’s—oh, my God.”
Abruptly, Carson halted the video, logged off the network, and cut the terminal’s power. ,
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
“They were the beta testers,” said de Vaca, as they walked slowly around the inner perimeter fence. “They all got it, didn’t they?”
“Every single one,” said Carson. “From the custodians to Singer himself. Everybody except us. We’re the only new arrivals since February 27th, the date of that file.”
“How exactly did you figure this out?” de Vaca was hugging herself tightly as she walked, seemingly chilled despite the late-afternoon heat.
“When I went to see Singer this morning, I saw him lining up the objects on his coffee table. There was something very obsessive about his movements that struck me as unusual, out of character. I remembered how Vanderwagon had acted just before he put his eye out, and Brandon-Smith’s obsessive habits in the last days. And then I noticed Singer’s bloodshot eyes, with the yellow cast in the whites. It was just what Vanderwagon’s eyes looked like. And Nye. Think about it. Don’t a lot of the people here seem to have bloodshot eyes these days? I assumed it was the stress.” He shrugged. “So I spent the day in the library, looking through the research files.”
“And found that tape,” de Vaca said.
“Yes. It must have been Scopes’s brainchild, having the rest of the Mount Dragon team be the beta test subjects for PurBlood. It’s a common enough thing in certain pharmaceutical companies, you know, to draw the volunteer pool from the company itself. They must have filmed it, thinking it would make good press later on.”
“Only some of the volunteers didn’t look too pleased about it,” de Vaca said wryly.
Carson nodded. “Scopes is a brilliant speaker. Between him, Burt, and peer pressure, sure, it’s not hard to see why everyone fell in line.”
“But what the hell is happening to them now?” De Vaca struggled to keep the sound of panic out of her voice.
“Obviously, the PurBlood is breaking down in their bodies, having a toxic effect. Perhaps impurities got into the phospholipid capsule, DNA mutations occurred. We don’t have the time to find out exactly. As the capsule decays, it’s all released.”
“How can you be sure it’s PurBlood?” De Vaca frowned.
“What else could it be? They all received transfusions. And they’re all beginning to show the same symptoms.”
De Vaca was murmuring to herself. “Dopamine. What was it Teece told you about dopamine?”
“He said that Burt and Vanderwagon were suffering from overdrives of dopamine and serotonin. Brandon-Smith, too, to a lesser degree.” Carson turned to her. “He told me that too much of those neurotransmitters in the brain can cause paranoia, delusions, psychotic behavior. You took two years of med school. Is he right?”
De Vaca stopped.
<
br /> “Keep walking. Is he right?”
“Yes,” she replied at last. “The production of bodily chemicals is very carefully balanced. If mutated DNA in PurBlood is instructing the body to pump out large amounts of ...” She paused, thinking, then began again. “Mental distress and disorientation would develop, perhaps combined with obsessive-compulsive behavior. If the overdrives were sufficiently great, the result would be extreme paranoia and fulminant psychosis.”
“And the leaky blood vessels Teece described must be another symptom,” Carson added.
“Naked hemoglobin, permeating through the capillary walls, would just make a bad situation worse. Poison the whole body. Bloodshot eyes would be the least of the problems.”
They walked for several minutes in silence. “Burt was the alpha test subject,” Carson said at last. “It makes sense he would be the first one affected. Then, last week, he was followed by Vanderwagon. Have you noticed any other odd behaviors?”
De Vaca thought. Then she nodded. “Yesterday at breakfast, that technician from the sequencing lab yelled at me for sitting in her chair. I got up and moved, but she wouldn’t let up. She’s normally such a mousy thing. I thought the pressure was getting to her.”
“Obviously, people are affected at different rates. But it’s only a matter of time until—”
He stopped. It wasn’t necessary to finish the sentence. Until the entire staff of this laboratory—this remote laboratory, in the middle of the desert, guardians of a virus that could destroy the human race—goes insane.
Suddenly, another thought struck him. He turned to de Vaca. “Susana, do you know when PurBlood is scheduled for general distribution?”
She shook her head.
“I read several memos about it in the library this morning. GeneDyne marketing has organized a massive media event. There’s going to be a big rollout, with all sorts of fanfare. They’ve chosen four wards across the country. One hundred hemophiliacs and children undergoing operations will be the first to receive PurBlood.”
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