Writers of the Future Volume 27: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “What don’t I know?” Victoria tried to make her voice as cold as Attie’s. She now realized there was far more going on here than she had originally thought, and she wasn’t very happy about it.

  Shamus had been her hero from the moment she had met him. She had trusted him instinctively. He had all the right words and all the right moves. Had she been mistaken? Had he been using her? Was their protest actually bad, the kind of wrong she had dedicated her life to overcome? Or was she jumping to conclusions?

  She took a deep cleansing breath, shaking herself, opening her mind. She’d learned the calming technique in New Delhi at a sit-in to save the Ganges, and she felt it really helped when the world got complicated. But thoughts rocketed through her mind so fast that nothing could slow them down. She had been lied to—she was being lied to now—and, somewhere inside the splitting headache that had begun to force itself on her already-throbbing skull, she was pissed off about it.

  “We’re not the bad guys here, Vic,” Shamus said.

  A horrible sour feeling formed in the pit of her stomach. Part of her didn’t want to know the answer, but she had to ask. “What have you been keeping from me?”

  “Tell her,” Attie said venomously.

  Shamus sighed. Victoria saw his shoulders slump, and he dropped heavily onto the hot pavement, collapsing into a heap like an imploding building. His body looked like one of those old statues that they used to place in parks, hard copper with a deep coat of bright jade patina.

  “What do I need to know that you haven’t told me?” she asked softly as she backed away, away from the stranger and away from her lover.

  The first Vectored infections FIT produced were simple piggybacks, genetic tags added to HHV6. That’s a variant of the herpes virus which infects more than 95% of the population at a young age. It doesn’t cause any serious health problems, so it was perfect as a delivery system. That was the whole project, at first. Nobody had a problem with it. But then they began to get ambitious. They started adding elements, selecting for specific and sometimes disturbing things. A group of doctors and scientists saw where this was headed, saw that this might lead to not just cures but modifications to the human genome, forced genetic homogenization.”

  “Wait a minute,” Attie interrupted. “Nothing like that was ever planned. Nobody’s trying to take over the world. That’s just paranoid propaganda. Vectoring is a tool, a means by which we can improve our whole species.”

  “How?” Shamus said. “I have documents that clearly show proposals for several radical alterations to the human genome, documents given to me by reliable sources.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Stop!” Victoria shouted. Her head wanted to explode. “I can’t take this all in. Let Shamus finish.”

  “Okay—so we recognized the potential for abuse and we petitioned for a halt to the program,” Shamus continued. “Typical bureaucracy, they ignored us. We shouted louder. We even made some headlines, but nobody really cared.

  “Things used to be different in the old days. There was a time when the people would have stood up and fought with us. I’d been in marches where the streets had undulated like a living carpet with the sheer press of bodies, and the sky was dark with news copters. People cared. They didn’t let the government make all the decisions for them, and they cherished their freedoms. Now . . .”

  Shamus waved listlessly to the east, toward the towering glass and plastic structures of downtown. He seemed so dejected that it nearly broke her heart. Victoria suddenly wanted to run to him.

  “Now nobody cares. As long as they’re plugged into a phone or a streaming media source, the rest of the world can go to hell. We’re becoming isolated, islands in the sea of humanity,” he said.

  “After we realized the news media couldn’t be counted on, we decided to fight fire with fire. We found backers overseas—and you’d be surprised at how easy it was. They agreed to do the work. All we had to do was tell them how.”

  “You did? You, personally?” she asked. She hadn’t realized that he’d been the driving force behind the protests. That in itself was frightening, to think that Shamus had been responsible for all this.

  “I was on the original team,” Shamus said. “We took HHV6 apart and rebuilt it protein by protein. We did a damned good job, too. The tests were so promising. Our virus ate the government’s variant for breakfast along every mutation. Absolutely no side effects. It appeared to be perfect, so we unleashed it. I Vectored it myself.”

  “I don’t understand,” Victoria said. “What were you trying to accomplish?”

  “It’s complicated, but we thought that if we could block the base code of the virus FIT was distributing, we’d be able to keep them from dispensing more updates.”

  “But that’s not what happened,” Attie interrupted. He glanced up as a disk-shaped helicopter passed by overhead, its rotors encased in a carbon mesh shield that made the machine look like a 1950s-era flying saucer.

  The expectant way his attention moved to the copter made Victoria realize that he must be waiting for something like that. Despite what Shamus thought, someone was coming to arrest them. Attie was just stalling for time.

  “We couldn’t understand why our own virus seemed to become impotent,” Attie said, his awareness returning to the plaza. “Several varieties were Vectored without success. My people suspected that it might not be a natural immune response, and that something like your group was responsible. We could never prove it—until today.”

  “Good.”

  “Not good,” Attie snapped. “You’ve compromised nearly the entire population. You and your group have weakened all of our immune systems to the edge of collapse, and our attempts to circumvent the problem have proven ineffective. We can’t fix this, not without knowing more about the topology of your variant.”

  Victoria could hardly think. There was so much new information flooding in, so much she hadn’t understood and still didn’t understand. The sunshine and the heat, the small clusters of people flaring through the spectrum of reds—from cherry to oxblood, to brick and ruby—as Attie weaved his way across the wide curved pavement; they all distracted her. She desperately wanted to run, but couldn’t pull herself away. If she left now, she’d never know it all.

  Shamus had continued to speak, shaking his head as if willing the information to become unreal. “It should have worked.”

  “But it didn’t.” Attie had changed his course, moving away from Victoria and toward Shamus. He casually brushed against a trio of college kids. The largest man, a dark kid in a slashed silver shirt and a black kilt, paused momentarily to give Attie a dirty look. Then he turned and dived on his friends, whispering something Victoria couldn’t hear. They all laughed—and they all brightened with the red glow of infection.

  “No, it didn’t. Our variant somehow interfered with the mechanism the body uses to prevent the synthesis of viral proteins in infected cells.”

  Shamus paused. His head tilted to one side as if he was listening to another conversation. Attie had circled around. He stood a dozen or so meters behind Shamus, pretending to stare at the screen of his wristbook.

  “This explains so much,” Attie said. Victoria could see him stealing furtive glances at the sky while at the same time trying to keep an eye on Shamus. “You do understand that everything you say can be used against you in a court of law. . . .”

  “I don’t care anymore.” Shamus sighed. “Vic, take off. Get the hell away from here.”

  “I’d prefer it if she stayed right where she was,” Attie said.

  “Go, Vic. This guy won’t leave me, and he can’t trace you. Get away.”

  “Wait!” she said. She couldn’t even breathe anymore. Her stomach churned and her legs had begun to tremble. She felt like the conversation had left her far behind. “I need to know. . . .”
r />   “Go, just go.”

  “No!” she yelled. “Answer me, damn it! Yes or no—no debates, no quotes from dead presidents, no technical terms to confuse me—are we still making people sick?”

  She held her breath, waiting. A long silence followed.

  “Technically, yes,” Shamus finally whispered. “Yes.”

  Victoria staggered back as if he’d punched her in the face. She’d been a fool for his good looks and smooth words—and his talk about saving the world. How could she have been so stupid?

  “All this talk about how the government was killing people and it was us! How could you!”

  She felt herself beginning to cry, but she forced it back. There’d be time for tears later. Instead, she concentrated on the anger. Shamus had betrayed her. He’d used her, letting her believe the whole time that she had been doing the right thing. It made her sick to think of how many times she’d spread his Vector.

  “We’re not killing people,” he growled. “Never say that! I’ve put my soul into turning this around.”

  “Maybe if we knew exactly what you did, we could fix the problem,” Attie offered. “It will go a long way toward mitigating the penalty for what you’ve done.”

  “No,” Shamus said.

  “But . . .” Victoria began.

  “Don’t you see? Just because we screwed up doesn’t mean we were wrong. I’m still convinced there’s a plot out there.”

  Her whole world was falling apart. Months of being with him and she thought she knew him, but now he seemed like a stranger, a paranoid stranger.

  It had all started so playfully, so carefree. They had shouted together in San Francisco while waving signs and screaming for the rights of mice. Later, they talked. He hadn’t tried to sleep with her or even kiss her. He spoke with her as an equal, and she respected that. He never talked down to her, never tried to change her. They laughed. She fell in love.

  But it was all a lie. Shamus had already been spreading his Vector even before they met. That summer night at the PETA rally, he had already been infected then, glowing in emeralds. If she had only been able to see it . . .

  “So what have we been doing this whole time?” she asked. She’d been carrying the Vectored infection off and on for more than half a year now, deliberately targeting others. She’d become an accomplice to a crime she hadn’t realized she was committing.

  “What we have to. There’s nothing else we can do,” he added hurriedly. There was a note of pleading in his voice. “You don’t understand.”

  “I think she’s beginning to understand,” Attie said. His voice had softened. It held a note of sympathy that seemed to churn inside her, making her even angrier.

  Her mind spun. Up was down, black was white, truth was—was just something that didn’t seem to exist anymore. Could Shamus really have kept this from her this whole time? Could she ever trust him again? He was a stranger to her now.

  “What do you want from me?” she said coldly. “Do you want me to go on infecting people? Do you want me to dance, to smile, to laugh while I poison people? I thought we were trying to stop others from doing that. I can’t do it, not now. I can’t be your puppet, Shamus. I can’t be your Typhoid Mary any longer.”

  Tears had begun to fall. Embarrassed, she turned away. She hugged the raised wall that marked the boundary between the pellet train station and the busy streets of downtown Las Vegas.

  “We’re not poisoning people, Vic.” Shamus stood. He rotated slowly until he spotted Attie. “The reason we—you and I, the others in our group—continue to spread this Vector is to save people. We’re committed to that. We always were. I never lied to you.”

  “But there was so much you never told me,” she said.

  “You never asked—and I know that’s an evasion. I should have told you. I should have explained all these things. But you were so innocent, so . . .”

  “Naïve,” she said.

  “Yes, naïve—but in a good way: unspoiled and not contaminated by the darker side of what had happened. You brought a joy to this disaster, and it helped me to feel as if it would all turn out okay. I was convinced—I am convinced that it’s only a matter of time until we Vector a cure for what we’ve done. Then we’ll be heroes.”

  She felt betrayed. She didn’t know what to think. She should have been told, allowed to make her own decisions. He’d treated her like a child. The whole time she had thought his dark past involved merely an old girlfriend or even an ex-wife. It had been cute, almost chivalrous at the time, when she thought he had only wanted to protect her. Now she had nothing, a hole in her heart where the truth used to be.

  “There are a lot of people who are going to need to know exactly how you managed this, Shamus,” Attie said. “What alterations you made, how many variations you’ve spread and where you’ve spread them. The CDC will have to be involved. We’ll try our best to turn the clock back on this, but . . .”

  “No. We can only move forward,” Shamus said. “The government will take this and corrupt it. Trust me. I know things, things that aren’t part of the public record. We can’t rely on FIT, or the CDC or any branch of the government connected to the Vectoring project. We need to stick together and work this out for ourselves, Vic. I don’t want to say it, but we need to keep dancing before the flames.”

  Victoria felt the strain tugging at her, threatening to rip her apart. Her heart wanted to go with her lover and his ideals, but her conscience felt the weight of the other man’s argument that it would have been better if they hadn’t tampered with nature. Shamus had lied to her. He’d told her that she would save the world, but right now she felt more like an accused mass murderer. His words disturbed her, but she believed in the sentiment behind them. She’d been taught that the government was uncaring at best, intentionally evil at worst. That’s why she always took the counterpoint. But where was the opposite pole here? Which way could she turn when each side seemed wrong?

  “There’s no way out,” Shamus said. “If we continue, there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to put things right, but if FIT or the CDC get hold of our Vector, they’ll use it to unlock their virus and start all over.”

  Attie sighed. Victoria could tell his impatience was growing. His backup must already be overdue. Cars full of agents would be coming soon, maybe even helicopters. They’d arrive in gangs, sirens shattering the serenity of the station. They wouldn’t ask questions or wait for complicated answers that required a moral epiphany to make a choice. They’d use cuffs and pepper spray. She didn’t know if Shamus would go quietly, but she would.

  Victoria glanced at her fingers, at the lime-colored flecks as they caught the sun. She felt harmless. Would her feelings change? Were her hands really deadly, and did they carry a bacterial Midas touch?

  It was time to go—but where, and with whom? And could she even leave knowing what she now knew?

  What do I do?” she cried out loud.

  “Forgive me,” Shamus whispered from behind her.

  She spun quickly, panicked at the unexpected sound of his voice so near. He reached out to her, his arms strong, welcoming. She yearned to fall into them, to let him take her away, take her back to the morning, or the previous day, or any time before she had learned the world wasn’t the place she thought it was. But touching was forbidden.

  “Don’t do that!” she shrieked. A couple in their early thirties, dressed in identical Hawaiian shirts and baggy blue shorts, paused. Concern played over the man’s fat sunburnt face.

  Victoria noticed them staring and laughed. She swung her arms in the air, twirled and giggled. She nearly touched Shamus then, but only knocked his silly fedora askew instead. She put on her best “happy couple just having a little spat” face and winked at the tourists. They waddled off, shaking their heads in unison like two bobblehead dolls.

  The moment they ha
d moved on, Victoria’s smile vanished.

  “I never meant to hurt you,” Shamus whispered as she drifted back through the crowd.

  But you did, she thought. Could it have been as little as an hour ago that she had been happy? What had happened to all that? She could no longer trust Shamus. Did that mean she no longer loved him?

  “I wish I could believe you,” she said.

  Shamus followed her, trailing behind like a poodle on a leash. He stood just beyond her reach, his face mostly hidden by the dumb hat. “Believe that I love you, and we’ll figure out the rest.”

  She couldn’t make the choice. Neither option made her feel good. She wasn’t God. She didn’t want the responsibility of deciding who lived and who died. It made her skin crawl to think that it was exactly what they had been doing, changing the world. What had they been trying to change it into?

  Maybe she wouldn’t make a choice at all. Maybe she should just turn and walk away. Let them fight it out, let Attie take Shamus to jail. She could go back and become a real shimmy girl, get the full fiber optics sewn under her skin and become a walking billboard. But then she’d have to face the crowds, the teeming masses of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, all unaware they were either about to die or were one Vector away from death.

  And the babies . . .

  She couldn’t give up on them. Some hope was better than having no hope at all, wasn’t it? But she was through taking things on faith. That had to stop. The little girl who followed her big strong boyfriend around and treated controlled contagion as a game was gone. She’d have to learn now, study the Vector process from both sides and decide for herself if what they had done could be corrected or not. She’d have to ask questions, questions she should have asked from the beginning. Instead, she’d let herself be led around like a toy balloon—an empty-headed, helium-filled balloon.

  She’d have to find out about those documents too, the ones Shamus had mentioned. If he could prove to her that the government was up to something, it would go a long way toward making her feel better about her choice. If not . . .