by Nicholas Lim
“Ah, there you are!” Skinner bustled through the outer hatch followed by Zahra. “We have some results for you. Not sure you’re going to like them mind.”
They assembled in the meeting room. Skinner passed around printouts.
“We have run RNA matches. Unfortunately we didn't get a hit.” Skinner shrugged. “Happens from time to time with the standard malaria probes. There is great variability in the malaria falciparum genome. Fortunately we have a reference chip.” When Garrett frowned Skinner nodded at Zahra. “It’s used with the gene analyser.”
Garrett looked up from the printout. “You have an analyzer?”
The massively-parallel gene pattern recognisers were new but she had read of them.
“Shani’s baby.”
“We call ours Sherlock,” Zahra said proudly. “Only three in the UK. Only had him a few months and he's already proved himself. Last week, in thirty minutes, he found a DNA sequence for a rare Sarcodina that would’ve taken us months to find. With the DNA reference chip, he can test against thousands of strains simultaneously.”
Skinner spread his hands. “Looking at my worksheet, we need all the help we can get. Unfortunately Shani is booked for the next couple of days. But if you can still help out, she has time to give you an intro. You only need the basics to set up the test.”
“Well you are privileged,” Bryce said. “Shani hasn't let anyone else near her new toy so far. Sherlock!” He raised his eyebrows.
Zahra showed Garrett the basics, how to define programs and submit jobs remotely from secured on-site workstations. “And we can write our own algorithms. Look.”
Garrett leaned forward, her interest caught by the search code. Zahra's approach was unsophisticated. Garrett made suggestions on matching sequences. She noticed the younger woman was impatient, quickly irritated by her own mistakes.
Garrett became conscious of Skinner hovering behind them, and his growing interest in the clock on the wall.
“Where is the actual physical sampling done?”
“Level four unfortunately. So we can test any agent. We can remote in from here to run analyses but that’s where the physical kit is.”
“I have PCR product ready from Fiona Grant.”
“Good. I’ll set up the falciparum chip and kick-off processing of our baseline Brighton data. Be a minute.”
Garrett picked up her samples. She found Zahra standing by the inner hatchway punching codes into a keypad.
“Bloody PINs.”
“Telephone number? Birthday?” Garrett suggested.
Zahra closed her eyes. Her lips moved silently. She tried another number. The door hissed. She smiled and nodded at Garrett. “Anniversaries of a sort. But we have to alternate them to pacify the security geeks. Okay, let’s suit up.”
Garrett followed Zahra into a room with lockers and changing cubicles. An observation window ran the entire length of one wall. Garrett walked over to it.
“That's our level four. Parasitology has no level three because of our larger level two.” Zahra pointed to a glass plate on the wall covering two handles, yellow and red. “A few things to run through. These alarms are for hot agent breaches. You’ll see them in every room.”
“Yellow secures lab by lab by the last man out. It can be reversed by pushing the handle back up. We’ve had three yellow alerts since I've been here,” Zahra raised her eyebrows, “All minor accidents in Sector Six.”
“Red is for level four or higher containment and cannot be reversed. The whole complex is sealed on a timed protocol: level four in one minute, the sector in two, the whole facility in ten. Door locks and air flow isolation are automatic and will not allow manual override.”
Garrett pictured again the containment circles Skinner had described – the surrounding concrete sheath and earth and the bio-secured entrance hatches.
“How many of those have you had?”
“None. Only drills.”
Blue biosafety suits of unusual design hung flaccid on pegs beside the lockers, like the discarded chrysalises of man-sized insects.
“Now what can I get into? I’ve put on so much weight,” Zahra muttered. Garrett watched her hold a biosafety suit up to her neck and smooth it down over her body. Her hand cupped her stomach as if holding an ache.
“So how come you’re working a bank holiday weekend, Christine? I mean, I know it’s an interesting case, but–” she paused then added, “Well, it's not all about work, is it? You've got to have a life.”
Garrett nodded gravely. “You're right.”
“You must really like your job.”
“Yes. Do you?”
“I did. I loved it! I was always happy to work the long hours. They never really bothered me.”
“You're talking as if you've stopped,” Garrett said.
“Am I? I suppose I am.” Zahra laughed. She glanced around the walls and sighed. “Don't get me wrong, the army's been good to me.”
“Some people would find this lab environment stressful. There are different sorts of research–”
“No, I like it here. The work's interesting. But you know, you get to the stage when you think about other things, don’t you? Not just work, work, work.” Zahra took a deep breath. “Can I ask you something?”
“Shani, sorry I need you.” Skinner called from the doorway. Bryce climbed through the hatch in front of him. “Christine, Rheinnalt can take you through to level four.”
Zahra shrugged her displeasure; she rolled her eyes as she walked back past Bryce.
“You’ve drawn the short straw Christine, you’ve got me. Has Shani found you a suit?”
Garrett shook her head. Bryce crossed over to the rack, selected a safety suit, held it up in mid-air and studied Garrett's size.
“You can have any colour as long as it’s blue.” Garrett forced eye contact. “This should fit you.”
“Thank you.”
He turned back to the pegs. Garrett suited up. She emerged from the changing cubicle to find Bryce standing by two large bins sorting through gloves, galoshes and helmets. He picked out a white metal dome with a clear visor. “I'm afraid we have to wear these. Have you worked in a bio-containment lab before?”
“I’ve done some culture work in level three labs.”
“The procedures here are more restrictive, but you get used to them. Power switch and air sockets here, on the side. There are lines in all the labs.” He motioned for Garrett to try on the helmet.
“These units have a reserve lung, that's why they’re a little heavy. You’ll see the chin plate holds the readouts.”
Garrett looked down her nose at a set of lime green LEDs.
Operating mode: isolation. Air remaining: 1 hour 16 minutes.
Bryce tapped keypad buttons at another hatch, spun the handle wheel and stepped through into a small airlock. Garrett followed. The scrubs turned out to fit badly and the plastic galoshes were cold on her feet. Bryce closed the hatch. The lights flickered and went out.
The black of the airlock was featureless. In the second it takes for the heart to adjust, Garrett reached for the wheeled handle behind her. A scream fled silent down the yards of her nerves. Eyes wide open, she registered two things: that the tiny LEDs on the chin plate of her helmet now read an hour and a quarter; and that her hand rested on an arm. It was warm and still as a stone rail. Another hand came to rest on hers.
There was a click. The main lights flickered back on. Garrett removed her hand from under Bryce’s.
Entry protocol complete. Door locks are released.
“I should have warned you.” Bryce turned his whole body towards her as he spoke, cumbersome in his suit.
They moved into level four. Bryce showed her how to plug in her helmet.
Operating mode: CONNECTED.
The loudest noise in the lab was the humming helmet. The conditioned air tasted metallic.
Sherlock turned out to be an unexciting grey box controlled by twin monitors and a keyboard. Bryce showed her where
to place her PRC product. They worked side by side in silence for a while.
“You don't like the dark do you.” His words sounded tinny through her helmet speakers.
“No.”
Garrett considered Bryce’s earlier courtesy. She shifted her feet in the cold galoshes. “When I was seven years old, I got myself trapped for nine hours underground. Since then, I've never liked dark spaces.”
“How did it happen?”
“It was a silly mistake. I was looking for new beetle species.”
Garrett heard a quiet laugh. She stopped to decide whether to take offence then smiled. “The crypt was one of the best places for them! It was disused, the old pews stored there were rotten. Perfect habitat. I had already found one pretty good ground beetle when I saw a Panagaeus cruxmajor. The Crucifix Beetle! Very rare. I didn’t have a free hand so I popped it in my mouth. When it squirted acid I dropped the torch and the bulb smashed. That’s when I found out the door had locked when it closed.”
“You feel fear but you don't scare easily, do you Christine? Lucky for us you are still prepared to help us here.”
When Bryce spoke next his voice was quiet, as if farther away. “I found, if you wait, the dark always passes.”
Beside them were two large glass-fronted freezers. Garrett could see test tubes and labelled slides racked in ranks like toy soldiers. She felt Bryce watching her through his glass visor.
“Our containment freezers. They’re rather full at the moment. Shani’s doing a cross-domain pathogen study with Sherlock. Cholera, Ebola, Tularaemia, Typhoid, Hantaviruses, Botulinum Toxin spores, Encephalitis, Anthrax, Nipah, the haemorrhagic viruses, Poxes, Yellow fever, MDRTB…you name it, we’ve got it in there. The most lethal collection in history.” He placed a gloved hand on a glass freezer top. “Remember Mendel’s peas in his Abbey? Perhaps his being a monk wasn’t a coincidence. Think of the community here as monastic, these samples lighting our way, like candles.” His voice was mocking.
Garrett laughed. “The Porton monastery?”
“In a way. And we’re not the first. If you think, directly above us, scattered over Salisbury plain within twenty miles of here, are Avebury, Stonehenge, Sarum. Similar centres of contemplation in their time. Lenses you might say.”
Garrett breathed in tasteless air and felt the inhuman constancy of the lab’s light and temperature. In here there was no day or night, there were no seasons. She felt a sudden impatience at Bryce’s facile connections. When she turned to face him the lights of the lab reflected in their opposing visors. “I disagree. Science is not the same as faith. What you believe you prove. The rest is superstition.”
Bryce’s suit swayed from side to side. “If you don't mind my saying so, you sound angry.”
“Do I? Yes, you're right. Lighting a candle didn't save my husband; better understanding of infection in coma patients might have.”
Garrett slowed down a little, shocked at herself. She took a deeper, air-conditioned breath. When she spoke again it was more softly. “Centuries of faith haven’t changed the lives of millions. Public healthcare programmes do. I’ve seen the difference that can be made.”
They worked in silence a while before she spoke again.
“We deceive ourselves easily. Science disciplines the human imagination.”
“Anger can blind,” Bryce's reply was soft but firm. “It prevents faith in something greater than ourselves.”
Garrett sighed. “I've had this argument before.”
“Who with?”
“My son.”
After three hours they stopped for a break. When the door closed behind them the lab returned to quiet. Above the faint hiss of air filtration units, Sherlock hummed briefly to itself as the platters in its disk bays answered a request for data. After some minutes the overhead lights clicked off.
The only remaining illumination in the lab came from two orange LEDs glowing on the freezer cabinet doors. The only remaining life in the lab was shelved inside.
The top rack held a tube containing a 50cc solution of Influenza A type H1N1; cultured from tissue from an Inuit woman buried for a century in the Alaskan tundra, it was a strain of Spanish flu that had infected one in four living humans within three years and killed a hundred million. The shelf below held the world’s most complete collection of Filoviridae, including samples from Côte d'Ivoire and Ebola: haemorrhagic viruses with, in some cases, fatality rates above ninety percent. The lower storage areas held boxes and vials of other rare pathogens. The countless microscopic killers waited motionless on the freezer shelves, their life suspended in the cold. The sequences digitised on Sherlock's discs held coded representations of the sleeping creatures, digitised shadows of their twisted nucleic strands.
The Analyzer disks began to stutter, a staccato beat that lengthened into a continuous static burst. A new analysis initiated from the outer lab had completed and the results were being written to disk, long strings of base acids, the coded shadow of a new organism.
Chapter 16
Fifteen UK National Health Service Trusts had reported Sentinel alerts in the last twenty-four hours against the original malaria broadcast warning of the sixth August. They stretched from Dorset on the South coast to as far north as Leicestershire.
On a normal working day, the regular contact between county health authorities would have been enough to raise suspicions that something unusual was going on. Unfortunately, meetings were at a bare minimum. Local epidemiology departments and General Hospital reporting units were running skeleton staffs over the August bank holiday weekend.
In any case Sentinel, the CDSC’s national disease analysis system, was relied on to raise the alarm. It had done so in the recent past, with signal success during two flu epidemics, a legionnaire’s disease outbreak and a cluster of nationwide food poisoning incidents. The escalation service was fully automated and proven.
But it wasn’t foolproof. The UK malaria outbreak had started with just three cases in Brighton, Sussex, on the South coast of England. No one was aware that the national count now stood at thirty deaths and a hundred and twelve identified infections. The counties with the highest infection rates were Sussex and Ceredigion in Wales.
***
Garrett picked up a four millimetre cube of Paul Fletcher’s heart tissue with a pair of plastic forceps. She dipped the sample into the steaming mouth of a glass beaker half-full with liquid nitrogen. After a silent count, she transferred the frozen block into the cryostat chuck of a microtome.
The Buffy orange test had confirmed mixed broods but found no more rogue cell forms. Skinner had just shrugged. Garrett had decided to prepare more tissue sections. Across that afternoon as she had worked, she had caught herself straining to hear background noises – the rumbling of traffic, planes going over, birdsong. But two hundred feet down, the subterranean room was quiet as the grave, the circulating air chilled and odourless. She felt isolated, as if on some voyage through a void for which she had not prepared.
She set the microtome's cutter to 5 microns and hit a switch. The diamond cutter began to whine. A thin ribbon of material peeled away like smoke, so thin it was transparent, the colour of greaseproof paper. Garrett watched, satisfied. A muted, interrupting squeak startled her a little, and she half-turned, to see Zahra enter the lab.
“Christine! Did you hear? Sherlock got a match!”
Garrett turned off the cutter.
“Let me show you!”
They sat together at a keyboard.
“I’ve only run analyses so far for Grant’s material. But four separate sequences confirm Sumatra-7: a rare, lethal South East Asian strain of cerebral malaria. Look.”
Zahra waited while Garrett reviewed the data and references. Garrett frowned.
“It doesn’t seem right.”
“I know the pathology is not exactly the same. It’s good we’ve found a match though, no?” Zahra said. “It’s progress.”
“But remember the blood films? And the rogue oo
kineetes?”
“We discussed that. George thought it might be because there’s very little Sumatra-7 data.”
“Even so.” Garrett stood a moment without speaking. She made a decision. “I’d like to run the other two cases. Can you show me how to set the analysis up?”
Zahra showed her how to navigate the Analyzer’s genetic repository. “You need to prep the PCR product and submit it in level four, like you did with Rheinnalt.”
Garrett nodded. She returned to the lab bench. She muttered ingredients as she began mixing a solution. “Five microlitres proteinase, sterile water, heart tissue–”
Zahra settled on an opposite stool. They discussed pathological anomalies and RAPID, Garrett’s gene matching software toolkit. Eventually Zahra stirred herself to work. She selected a glass slide from a rack and clipped it onto the stage of a microscope. She stopped to watch Garrett load a centrifuge with lysate.
“Do you have any children Christine?”
“Yes. I have a son.”
“What's his name?”
“Jason.”
“How old is he?”
“Twenty-two.”
“My God!”
Garrett smiled. She opened the centrifuge and considered the eluted DNA. She began mixing amplification reagents. Her hands moved with a disciplined precision to match her speed.
“Were you frightened when you were pregnant?”
“Yes. There were some complications in my second trimester. I thought I would lose the baby.”
“That must have been awful.”
Garrett set a timer for thirty cycles and flicked a switch. Primers and polymerase began to act as molecular scissors on target DNA, snipping target genomes into tailored pieces.