by Welke, Ian
“You’re going to tell me that you designed this virus?”
“No.” He laughs.
I realize how much I’ve missed this laugh, even if there’s just the hint of the joy it brought when we were in school.
“We were just working on challenges to a piece of security software. I think there were lots of firms subcontracted to develop pieces of the virus. The whole thing was compartmentalized. It’s meant to keep one person from knowing what it all does when put together. At worst, we worked on the delivery method. We didn’t work on the virus.”
“Who worked on that? Who made it work on people?”
“I have no idea. I don’t even know anyone capable of something like that. I mean people have theorized about connecting consciousness with computers, but this is one hell of a leap forward.”
I glare at him.
He takes two steps back and holds up his hands. “You know what I mean.”
“It seems more like magic than technology.”
“There’s an old adage about sufficiently advanced technology being no different than magic. But I don’t know. Whatever you want to call it.” He drops his hands to his sides. “At this point, I’m pretty much accepting what I see at face value. I keep thinking I’m paranoid. I mean just think about who could be behind it. Government agency using secret tech we’ve never heard about? Corporate conspiracy? If you were to tell me this is part of an alien invasion, the beginning of an ancient prophesied apocalypse, or some powerful corporation run amok, I’d say you may be right.”
“Or we’re both insane and imagining all of it.”
“You may be right.” He smiles, but still looks sad.
“And you used your phone to zap those guys at the mall. How did you do that?”
“When I started to suspect what was happening, I figured it was only a matter of time before whoever’s controlling these people weaponized them against those of us that remain unaffected. The controlled have a large quantity of data being pushed into their brains by this virus. I wrote an algorithm to flood them with meaningless noise. It sort of overwhelms their senses.”
“But doesn’t cure them.”
He shakes his head. A moment ago he was in his element, thinking about his tech. That energy fades and he starts to droop.
“All right. So what do we do now?”
“Weep? Give up?” His voice cracks and he looks like he might fall over if he doesn’t sit down. “I think what we do now is not figure out how to fix it, but figure out what the first step is in learning how to fix it. I have a few ideas where to start, but… What I’ve seen of their code, it’s non-intuitive to work with.”
I take his hand. It’s trembling. “Rest.”
He shakes his head. “I can’t rest. I don’t know what to do.”
“Start by sitting down, or you’ll be no good to anyone.” I clear some abandoned Chinese food containers off his love-seat, and wait for him to sit. Apart from the food containers, the place is pretty clean. It’s remarkably free of dust. It’s like he moved in just last week, but hasn’t picked up at all since. “What made you decide to contact me?”
“I didn’t. I mean, when I found out we were being used, I thought of the people I’d warn if I could, and you were the only one who listened to me.” He sits down on the space I cleared.
I’m not sure what to say. I should be grateful he’s warned me, but should I be creeped out that I’m on his short list of people he cares about, even though we haven’t spoken in ten years? Eventually, I realize I’m too numb to question it. “I wasn’t even sure if it was you.”
“Yeah. I thought about sending something only you and I would know, but my memories are so blurry. College seemed to produce a lot of blurry memories.”
“How did you first know something was wrong?”
“People started acting abnormally. Not like at the mall abnormal. I noticed people stopped coming in to work. People who are never sick stopped coming in. When I heard from them, their email sounded stilted. It sounded like it had been outsourced to Mumbai, translated to Hindi and back to English.”
“So the virus affected them. Their own creation got out, and infected them. Sort of poetic justice in a not very funny way.” I shiver, and rub my arms.
“I don’t know that it was an accident. The people who are behind this, I think this is what they wanted.”
“What’s happened… Can it be fixed?”
“Theoretically. But I’m not sure where to start working on the how.” He rubs his temples. “It would help if I understood the what or had a hint as to the why.”
“I don’t like thinking that my version of reality is in need of a patch,” I say.
“And a security update.” He stands, goes to the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. He returns with a glass of water and hands it to me. “Even if we can fix this, before we do, we need to make sure we can stop it from breaking everything right back again.” He heads back into the kitchen. He takes two shot glasses from the table and rinses them out in the sink. Reaching up to a cupboard he pulls out a bottle of Glenmorangie. The bottle is the lone object in the cupboard. “For one thing, we need to make sure we can protect ourselves from the virus. Once they realize not everyone’s affected, they’re bound to want to find out why. If what we’re seeing is the release, I’d hate to see their test cases.”
I set down the water and wait for the whisky. “I just can’t get over it.” I close my eyes. Visions of the symbol flash in front of me, and my eyes pop back open. “I keep thinking that this isn’t real. It’s just another dream. If we drive back to the mall, if we reverse our footsteps, we’ll see the normal world the way it was the day before yesterday.”
He hands me the shot, and downs his. “After I show you what I have to show you, you’ll have no doubts.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The smell of smoke hits me as soon as I step out of Michael’s apartment. I bring my arm up to shield my mouth and nose, but I’m too late. I start coughing, choking on my own spit. My lungs spasm for air. My eyes burn. There’s too much smoke for it to be just brush fires in the hills. Leaning over the rail, I peer through the haze and find its source, burning buildings two streets over. Flame leaps out of two homes on that block. It takes me a while for my eyes to adjust to the air, but I spot plumes rising from other blocks in the distance. The black smoke contrasts against the hazy sunset.
Michael sets down a laptop and drops a duffel bag from his shoulder as he bends over coughing. When he stops there’s no sound, but the wind. The absence of sound is eerie. There’s quiet where there should be sirens and crowds of onlookers.
“C’mon,” he says. “If no one comes to put those out, they could spread fast.”
I take one last look from my bird’s eye view over the Garden Grove suburbs before following him down the steps to the parking lot. In the time we’ve been inside, the parking lot has changed. There are still no cars in the lot. The only cars block the entrance at the security gate where they’d been left. The heaps of trash and debris have grown. Piles of garbage, overturned shopping carts, wads of plastic grocery bags, have congealed into clusters, creating spiraling galaxies of litter.
An opaque plastic tarp skids across the asphalt. Its edge hits my shoes. I see movement beneath it. The tarp crackles. A dark shape moves fast underneath. A black rat skitters out from under the tarp, running right between my feet and past me. I jump straight up. When I land I see Michael has jumped over the parking lot security bar onto the hood of the black Impala blocking the entrance. More dark shapes move below the tarp. Similar shapes skitter under the other clusters of trash.
We pick our way through the rest of the lot, choosing the path that puts the most distance between us and any potential clusters of rat infested trash, before rounding the corner to the alley where we’d left Michael’s car.
By the time we get there, the sky has darkened enough that I can pick out flickering lights circling over the city. At first, there are only tw
o, but the longer I look, I realize the sky is thick with them. The chop of blades gets louder as one of their circles comes overhead. We shut the doors to the car just as a spotlight shines over us and passes into the neighborhood to our right.
Michael starts the car, but lets it idle.
“What’s wrong?”
“Not sure I want to turn on the lights.”
“I guess it depends on whose side those helicopters are on.” I stare up through the windshield. “I keep thinking about what we saw at the mall.”
He rests his head on the steering wheel, his hands on either side of his temples.
“Just because the mall-cops are corrupted doesn’t mean every cop is. Rent-a-cops are for rent. It’s right there in the name.”
He sighs. “No use staying here, I guess.” He puts the car in drive and we start down the alley with just the parking lights on. He only puts the lights on full when we hit a neighborhood lined with trees.
“It’s going to take forever to get anywhere without the freeways.”
“In the housing tracts, the trees might keep us out of the eyes of those helicopters. And the freeways are clogged. The last news coverage I saw before it all went offline, reported some sort of mass migration of commuters stuck. When we go by the 91 you should be able to see it. The glow of headlights, stuck there until they run out of battery life and the lights fail.”
“The 405 was empty this morning.”
“No telling where the virus is telling people to go, or why.”
As we coast down another residential street, I roll the window down and peer out into the night. All the houses are dark. There are no televisions turned on too loud. No kids yelling, and no parents losing their tempers trying to control them. There’s just silence. The only sounds are leaves blowing and helicopter rotors. At least the neighborhood isn’t on fire, and the smell of smoke is farther off now.
Out of force of habit I reach for the radio, but stop before turning it on. “Is it safe to try the radio?”
Michael nods. “It should be. Even if they’ve converted the virus to a radio signal, the software in our phones should cancel it out. If we even need the phones to stop us from getting infected.”
“Why wouldn’t we need protection?”
He looks to the left, then back through the windshield. He opens his mouth, stops, thinks it over and starts again. “Just a theory. We should have been exposed. We were exposed. I was definitely exposed. Everyone in my company went over before anyone else. So it got me thinking. Maybe some people are immune, or at least resistant.” He mutters under his breath, “Or we’re just paranoid.”
There’s silence.
It makes sense to me that not everyone’s the same. The great plagues left a better-resistant population. Some people had to be resistant to the Black Death or no one would have survived. And there’s still that thought at the back of my mind.
Are things as bad as they seem? If I could fall asleep would I wake up and everything would seem normal? At least more normal?
Lost in recursive and unhelpful thinking, the silence gets uncomfortable, so I go ahead and try the radio. His car doesn’t have a scan button, so I twist the knob searching for a signal.
Buzzing Male Voice: Accumulate. Your wants at lot five. You know you want it. Your needs freedom at lot five. Everyone got to lot five!
Buzzing Female Voice: You’re absolutely right. Lot five is where it’s at. People want freedom. The sale at lot five.
Buzzing Male Voice: Right. Free market moneys freedom. Fun and liberty at lot five.
I switch the radio back off. “Never could stand talk radio.”
Neither of us say anything as we drive through another dark street surrounded by unlit homes.
“Why is talk radio back on the air at all? Why do they need it when they can just use their virus to control people?” I ask.
“It could be just a phase of the infection plan, establishing the new normalcy. Or it could be part of the virus. Like the virus doesn’t control people on its own, just makes them more susceptible. They need a key or a trigger to make it work.”
I ponder this as we drive through another abandoned neighborhood. “I wonder what’s at lot five,” I say, more because I want to break the silence than out of curiosity.
“Where we’re going, we may be able to find out. If all goes well, when we’re done I should have a means of reading the data the virus is sending these people. I’ve got a packet sniffer. At the facility, the packets are in their unencrypted form.”
Michael steers the car onto an arterial road. We emerge from a lower-rent residential area of apartment buildings onto the main street. The freeway overpass glows, headlights create a halo over the sound walls. A horn blares, droning endlessly in the distance. The symbol is painted on the side of the overpass.
“We’ll have to leave the car in the next block.”
After another turn, Michael coasts the car past three more houses. We lurch to a stop. The front wheel catches the curb under a Jacaranda tree in front of a two-story house. These tract homes are similar to the neighborhood I grew up in, developed and overdeveloped in the same way. The second story of the house we’re parked in front of is definitely an addition, but it looks as though everyone on the block has had the same contractors.
We get out of the car and Michael opens the trunk. He hands me a Maglight. It has a good heft to it, about the same as my mace. “Only turn it on if you really need it,” he says.
I hadn’t thought of it as a light.
He motions for me to follow toward the side of the house. A silver wire with a large washer extends from the top corner of the gate. Michael pulls the wire, opening the gate door, and goes through. The dog in the neighbor’s yard barks. The barks are answered by another dog, then two more, and then a full chorus of neighborhood dogs.
I stop at the open gate. “Who is going to feed the dogs?”
He stops, and begins to laugh. His laugh starts as a chuckle, all his exhaustion and frustration comes out as the laugh grows manic. For a moment I wonder if it’s going to stop, or if this is him losing it, and he’s going to leave me here on my own, in this strange neighborhood, in this twisted corrupted dream world. He regains his composure, visibly relieved to have had the release. “It’s always the dogs people worry about. If you’d like, when we come back you can feed them. But if we can’t figure out how to set things right, there’re a lot of dogs in a lot of neighborhoods that are going to go hungry.” He catches his breath and starts through the side yard toward the back.
Something moves in the hedge behind me. Remembering the rat from the parking lot, I chase after Michael. He hops a shoulder-high brick wall and I follow. From the top of the wall I drop down into an alley. We creep down the alley in a slow jog. He points at a puddle of reeking water, and we step around it.
He leads me to a chain link fence alongside a warehouse and a parking lot. “This way,” he says, and he throws his old Army jacket over the barbed wire at the top of the fence.
“When did you go all commando?” I wait for him to get over before I climb up after him. I swing my leg over the jacket, careful not to catch my ankle on the exposed wire.
He reaches up with both arms to help me down on the other side. “I’ve learned a thing or two since college.”
Without the city’s halo of lights, the sky is darker than I’m used to, but there’s enough moonlight that I can see the ground in front of me. I step around the contents of a ruptured garbage bag. Broken glass crunches under my shoes as we cross the dilapidated parking lot. Weeds poke through the broken tarmac. The trash ends as we get closer to the rear of the warehouse. I lean up against the aluminum siding of the wall.
“What are we doing here?”
“You wanted proof. If there’s something that can be done to fix this, it’s in there.”
“I just can’t help but think we’d be better off running, or hiding.”
&nbs
p; “Annie, I don’t know that there’s anywhere to hide.”
Thinking of Jane and my mom, I ask, “If we go in there, there’s a chance we can help people who are infected?”
“A chance.”
“How do we get in?”
“The back door’s not watched. At least it wasn’t the last time I was here.” Michael puts his phone up to the door’s keypad. It cycles through sounds, something like my old “Simple Simon” game. The lock clicks. Michael reaches for the handle. “Ready to go through the looking glass?”
~
The difference between the outside of the warehouse and the inside is overwhelming. The crossover is intense. A crushing pressure change fills my ears with whistling feedback. The auditory feedback is met with a series of images fired through my head like my eyelids are a film screen. By the time I’m through the door to the other side, I’m covered in a thick film of sweat. I look back through the doorway in disbelief, unsure that what I’ve experienced is real.
When Michael comes through, I’m still gripping the sides of my head, as if I can squeeze my brain back into one piece.
“You might have warned me you were serious,” I say, but all that comes out is a whisper. Chills run up and down my back and more sweat trickles down my brow. I haven’t felt like this ever. It’s like a strong fever mixed in with a head full of acid. My head feels like it’s full of cooking oil and my brain cells are bubbling to the top.
Michael seems to handle it better, but he’s been here before. He winces and wipes the sweat from his eyes.
The first room in the warehouse looks like an English Lord’s sitting room. Furniture carved from heavy wood stands too tall to be practical for a normal person. The creature I saw in the mall would be tall enough. Paintings depict alien scenes, like eighteenth century pastorals of different worlds. The fields in the paintings are the wrong colors. In one painting, a cityscape grows out of a forest of barbed wire vines, with building towers hewn from ivory tusks of creatures the size of continents.