The Next Big One

by Derek Des Anges

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got a scanner behind me. How much is it worth?”

  “Realistically,” said Ben, “fuck all, but I’ll give you fifty bucks for the trouble of scanning it and mailing it.”

  “And digging it out of these boxes,” Mike Walker added, although he didn’t seem too bothered. “It’s right here in the one marked ‘potential blackmail material’.”

  “Great,” said Ben, suspecting that he was about to pay fifty American dollars for contrived bullshit. “Mind if I ask what you do now you don’t have to clean shitty offices?”

  “Sure,” said Mike Walker, “I run a company where other people go and clean shitty offices. Living the dream.”

  “Did you really save that for blackmail?” Ben added, as Mike Walker rustled on the other end of the line.

  “Ah, nah. I took it because it was a secret,” Mike Walker dumped something heavy on the desk beside the phone. “And I’m kinda a pack rat. Doesn’t go well with cleaning. But—” there was another thump “—truth be told? Between you and me? I was gonna write a screenplay.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Eh,” said Mike Walker, “I don’t have the attention span for screenplays.”

  He’d made it back down to the much busier main Egyptian galleries, surrounded by pink granite sarcophagi and noseless pharaohs, by the time Mike Walker’s email came through to him, complete with a large picture attachment.

  It distracted him from his original, unwanted train of thought, which had begun to drift towards whether or not he should think about emailing Daniel and finding out why he wasn’t talking to him; relieved, he slipped sideways into the Assyrian lion hunt, which was darker, and emptier, and a lot more claustrophobic.

  The minutes were as dull as every other set of minutes, but further in Ben found his eye caught by the phrase:

  crisis-engineering

  He squinted at it, and realised that his growing headache probably had more to do with one of his contact lenses coming out.

  Raised: Contract available at discount with XXX.

  Ben frowned, half to bring the notes into focus. XXX were a complete unknown. He hadn’t the first idea what they did, who they were, why they’d have been consulted.

  Raised: XXX have capability to induce profitable states.

  Enquiry: a profitable state equitable to flu outbreak etc with appropriate supply of treatment is not a watertight opportunity: competitors have comparable solutions & a bidding war would take place.

  Enquiry: generics may also be manufactured on longer-standing patents if need is severe enough, undercutting us.

  Raised: Low-risk novel pathogen also in patent would result in exclusive market. Novelty would also increase distress and therefore attention to outbreak and desire for solutions.

  Enquiry: A novel pathogen in patent would be easily-traced and raise questions about security and possibly result in fine/bad publicity

  Conclusion: shelve for time being, not a productive line of discussion

  Raised: SSRI marketing in developing world.

  “This has got to be bullshit,” Ben said, as a family tried to jostle past him.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Sorry.”

  Ben hastened back the way he’d come, and in the great court leaned back on the central rotunda — home to a special exhibition on the impact of the Black Death on the technological progress of fourteenth-century Europe, apparently chosen by a director with very poor taste in zeitgeist-y tie-ins — and tried to think clearly with a pounding myopic headache.

  It had to be bullshit. There was no way pharmaceutical companies sat around and toyed with the possibility of — of what? Making things worse so they could make them better? Surely that was pointless. There were so many diseases in the world already, so many people dying of, of AIDS and Ebola and, and, measles and cancer, surely they didn’t need to throw more into the mix, and ‘low risk’…and…

  Ben shook his head and nearly lost his balance. He thought back to Dr Bill’s second book, which he’d started reading and never finished: reams of figures on the costs of clinical trials, approval, how much it cost to research, how difficult it was to come up with novel cures…how most of the funding from pharmaceutical companies went on making ‘me-too’ drugs designed to do the same thing as a competitor but slightly differently…

  There was a bottleneck at the front entrance: Ben joined the long queue of tourists trying to get back out into the biting cold, their inexplicable bucket hats in bright colours making a strange molecular pattern in front of him.

  The cost would be astronomical. Someone else would have had to have done all the work.

  Or work that was applicable to more than one problem.

  Ben shuffled out and down between the pillars, hopping down the steps. He put one hand over his contactless eye. You couldn’t sit down and design a virus from start to finish, but if you had…bits and pieces. A happy accident while looking up something else. Maybe…

  He shook his head again, and walked into a low wall.

  They’d said low-risk. And they’d shelved the idea. No one released deadly viruses on purpose unless they were terrorists. Or completely stupid.

  It had to be a hoax of some sort.

  He thought through the swathes of management changes at the BBC; the projects that had been shelved, re-aired, reworked, ignored, re-shelved, and made it to air without anyone knowing what the original had been for or who’d written it.

  This was different, Ben thought, stubbornly. This was science.

  “Stealth epidemic,” proclaimed a headline the Metro, as it fluttered on Museum Street like a felled bird.

  No one sat down and tried to infect people on purpose.

  The next morning, Ben had been kicked out of the flat by Kingsley for Saturday recording, and already had a coffee in his hand when the invitation came for another one.

  To: Ben M

  From: Khoo, Daniel

  Subj: coffee?

  If you’re around Longacre this morning I’m going to fling myself on the mercy of Nero just opposite All Saints. Why not come and slurp caffeine out of my paycheque? I owe you for drinks, I think.

  Somewhat confused — Daniel had more or less vanished for nearly two weeks and was now acting as if nothing had happened at all — Ben assented, thinking as he did how silly it was to abandon one coffee so he could go to a less good coffee shop somewhere else.

  He reached the Nero in question around half-past eleven, and found Daniel guarding one of the tiny tables, already armed with a latte and one empty espresso cup.

  “Sit,” Daniel said, “I’m getting another one.”

  When he returned, Ben had worked his way a third down the cup and was still confused.

  “How goes the investigation?” Daniel asked. “You’ve been very quiet.”

  “It’s gone weird,” said Ben. “I don’t really want to talk about it because I’ll sound mental.”

  “The situation is mental,” said Daniel, drumming his fingers along his own forearm. “And, for the record — I assume that thing is still switched on—”

  “It doesn’t switch off.”

  “Well, that’s reassuring. For the record, I know what’s going on because Bill’s been keeping me informed.” He gave Ben a penetrating look. “Still not sure why you haven’t been, though.”

  Ben frowned gently at the latte. “You don’t recall ringing me up and interrogating me about my sex life?”

  “Sexual history,” said Daniel. “And I was asking for a reason.”

  “So that you could laugh at me,” Ben said, quietly. “What a great reason.”

  “No, actually,” Daniel said, playing with his coffee. “I wanted some perspective. I meant to get on to.” He pushed the espresso away from him, and tightened his jaw. He seemed to be trying out things to say — at one point his lips parted as if he was about to blurt something out, but it vanished behind his teeth and an abortive, inconclusive movement towards the espresso.
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br />   Ben waited.

  Daniel’s smile was blunt and a little angry. “There is a fucking massive problem with early symptoms like ‘recklessness’ and ‘disinhibition’ and ‘promiscuity’ and that is that for some of us, that’s normal behaviour.”

  “I see,” said Ben, picking up his latte again.

  “Do you? I suppose it’s alright for you, you’re not—” Daniel very clearly bit his tongue, and hurried on past the obvious pitfall. “So aside from the pathologisation of the entire gay scene.”

  “Daniel,” said Ben, rubbing his face. “Just get yourself tested if you’re worried. You know what’s involved in a test.”

  Daniel clenched his jaw and stared out of the window with the tiny espresso cup in his hand, still resting on the table. “Alright. Maybe I don’t want to know how much of me is really a disease.”

  Ben raised his eyebrows and elected to drink more over-sugared latte. “I think,” he said, when he’d finished, “in fact, I’m sure, having fucking horrible taste in music isn’t a symptom.”

  Daniel snorted, and looked away from the window, but he didn’t seem any less tense. With a calculatedly careless tone, he said, “Oh, I stopped counting when I got into triple figures, but—” he forced a smile, one that looked more like a grimace, and took a sip. “…I think I’ve probably fucked about three hundred and forty people in my life, kissed probably twice that, and that’s sort of a lot of risk factors, wouldn’t you say?”

  “God, Daniel,” Ben said, crossly, annoyed that he was annoyed, “just fucking get tested then.”

  “I was,” Daniel said, “six months ago. All clear. Clean as a penny whistle across the board. No itches, no oozes, no Hep, no AIDS, no clap, no crabs, no KBV, nothing.”

  “Well then,” Ben complained, exasperated and alarmed by the ongoing tension in Daniel’s jaw and the movement of his eyes. “What’s the bloody problem?”

  “That was six months ago.”

  “And you’ve slept with about a million people since then.”

  “Around forty,” Daniel corrected. “Actually, probably slightly less than that, I’ve not really. Very much in the last few months.”

  “Sputum test,” Ben said, shrugging. “I mean, you can judge for yourself how accurate but I don’t see—”

  “Have you?”

  “What?”

  “Been tested?”

  Ben regarded Daniel with confusion. “No?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I am, as you pointed out, a fucking monk,” said Ben, grumpily.

  “You shagged that Gareth,” said Daniel, talking to his coffee.

  “Are you ever going to shut up about that? What is the problem with that?” Ben realised he’d raised his voice, and put coffee in front of his mouth to cover for it.

  “Apart from the fact you apparently never wanted to do it,” said Daniel, hotly, “KBV’s been in this country for nearly five years, three and a half of them without anyone knowing about it. Now I know you were in some sort of heterosexual love bunker for two and a half of those, but I’m guessing you got Date Rapist spit in your mouth.”

  “He thinks I’m spreading rumours about him,” said Ben, bitterly, but he did not dispute the epithet.

  “They’re not fucking rumours if they’re true,” Daniel finished his espresso in one swig. “Can I make a deal with you?”

  “A what?”

  “A pact, or whatever.”

  Ben regarded him with suspicion. “A what.”

  “If I go and swab the inside of my mouth and make sure I haven’t accidentally contracted protracted death from some condom-heavy bathroom activities with strangers, will you do the same and make sure Gareth the shitty sexual predator hasn’t left more than just a bad taste in yours. Sooner, rather than later?”

  A successful night at the Queen took ended less successfully, with Ben agreeing to go back for an afterparty somewhere in Dalston, where it more-or-less snowed cocaine and three people claimed to have read articles he hadn’t actually written, before giving him their long-winded opinions on how they were going to become journalists and something something Hunter S. Thompson.

  He went to sleep on a convenient sofa around five, his head cradled in Molly’s lap while Molly used her folded arms and his back as a pillow.

  The sofa felt a lot less convenient when he woke up at midday and almost everyone else had gone.

  “Guhblugh,” said Ben to Molly, who had woken him by kicking him repeatedly in the foot.

  “Get up,” Molly repeated, grabbing his hand. “Brunch.”

  “Can’t face it.”

  “Breakfast Club brunch!”

  “That’s miles away.” Ben lurched into sitting position mostly through Molly’s exuberant yanking on his arm, took his glasses out of his bag, and threw his contacts case in the bin.

  “Wow,” Molly said, as Ben finally made it to his feet. “You look so different with those, I keep forgetting.”

  “Oh god,” Ben complained, trying to stretch. “I’m too old for this.”

  Molly wordlessly offered him a packet of Tic Tacs.

  “What?”

  “You, um,” Molly waved her hand in front of her mouth.

  They caught up with some of the others at the Breakfast Club, and despite Ben excusing himself as a keen observer and non-partaker of brunches, one of the people he’d met the previous night kept trying to force egg-fried fries on him.

  “Toast,” Ben suggested, dodging a chip for the umpteenth time.

  “Ben doesn’t like food,” Molly said, reaching around him to fend off, intercept, and consume the fry.

  “I love food,” Ben said with no sincerity whatsoever, “but when you’ve had my flatmate’s cooking everything else just seems bland in comparison.”

  “Is he like Indian or something?” asked one of the new acquisitions from last night.

  Ben tried to exchange a glance with Molly, who’d picked up a packet of dried apricots from somewhere and was eating them with an enthusiasm Ben couldn’t hope to justify. He said, “He’s from Bristol?”

  The sky was thick with bright, eye-hurting clouds all the way home, and the streets full of the aimless and hungover. Ben found the buses made him feel sick, and had to keep climbing off and on the same route to maintain an air of respectability and non-vomit: the afternoon was almost over by the time he came along the road to his flat.

  His stomach gurgled wistfully: he stopped for bread, Ozil tried to sell him speed, and he climbed the stairs wearily, but in good spirits.

  “Have you seen this?” Kingsley demanded, the moment Ben had shut the door behind him. As an afterthought, he added, “You dirty stop-out.”

  “Seen what?” Ben dragged his bag over to the futon and let it fall.

  Kingsley was watching a “News Special”, which almost immediately poured water on Ben’s good mood. He was also eating something which smelled heavenly, and ackee, which Ben still wasn’t wholly sure about.

  “There’s more in the kitchen,” Kingsley said, with his mouth full, and gestured to the TV with his fork. “Have you seen this shit, man?”

  “Rather than reducing the workload on our one triple-testing capable set of laboratories,” said a man advertised as a spokesperson for HPA, “the sputum tests have more than quadrupled it. We’re seeing a very, very heavy flow of blood vials in through here, and we simply do not have enough resources to cover it all. The facility at Newcastle is to all intents and purposes similar enough to the one at Colindale that we can spread the load, and every precaution will be taken to prevent contamination. The facility already processes HIV tests, this is not entirely dissimilar to that.”

  “What’s happening?” Ben asked, putting the bread down beside him.

  “Gimme a slice of that?” Kingsley held out his hand. Once he’d been gifted with bread, he dolloped a certain amount of whatever it was he was eating onto it, and passed it back to Ben. “Knock yourself out.”

  “And please, please,” said the TV,
“if you think you have a cold, or the ‘flu, don’t visit your GP during Test Hours.”

  “What’s that about the triple-test?”

  “Shh,” Kingsley said. “They’re explaining.”

  The screen cut to a studio. Ben took a cautious bite of bread loaded with something and felt his taste-buds dissolve into happy nothingness.

  “After less than two months of roll-out,” said the news presenter whose name Ben kept forgetting, “KBV sputum tests have sold out multiple times from pharmacies and are becoming part of the standard STI and post-trauma testing kits at many surgeries and hospitals. But are they effective? According to the tests, more than ten times more of the population are infected with this illness than originally projected, and the strain on blood-testing facilities is immense. Does the triple-test confirm these figures? Dave.”

  “Well, Katy,” said her co-anchor. “The news from HPA is preliminary, but the rate of error does seem to be steady at fourteen percent false-positives — that is to say, around fourteen percent of people who’re given a preliminary diagnosis via sputum test turn out not to have KBV — or if we want to be really finicky, about thirteen point eight six three percent, but I don’t think we need to go into that level of detail!”

  “No, no,” Katy agreed, shaking her head.

  Ben opened his mouth to ask another question, but Kingsley shushed him.

  “What we have,” said Dave, turning to the camera, “is a serious, silent epidemic. While the government have pledged that work will begin on additional quarantine wards as soon as possible, the NHS is already overstretched, and the numbers of confirmed cases is climbing by the day.”

  Ben stopped with the bread halfway to his mouth and said, “Uh—”

  “Unless you’re putting food in your mouth, close it.”

  “Questions have been asked,” continued Katy, also addressing the camera, “concerning whether this country can afford the increased burden on the health service this epidemic represents. Suggestions range between one and eight billion pounds overall cost in terms of lost man hours and dwindling tourist revenue…”