Anger twisted the Kraken’s face, pride overcoming the anguish and the germs coursing through her system. Her Atman flashed erratically and seemed to send up a slight puff of ozone from her wrist.
“What did you call me?” she said, her pale face suddenly turning crimson. Grimacing, she doubled over, and vomited on the floor. I slapped her back instinctively as powerful heaves of blood thrust up out of her throat, splashing everywhere.
“Pretty nasty, Suzanne,” I said. I turned to Mary, who was fully suited. “Let’s bring her with us. I’m sure we can use her as leverage with Fujimi.”
“But Joe,” Mary said within her rubber bubble, reaching out and grabbing my arm. “Don’t you want to put on one of the suits?”
I stopped to look at her.
“I’m already infected, Mary. What’s the point?”
I picked my gun up off the floor, checking the safety was off.
“My only hope is to get a cure,” I added.
“No cure,” the Kraken said, her head shaking, bile slopping from her lips. “I was promised immunity. No vaccine, no antibody, no inoculation. No cure.”
I yanked her by the ear toward my office. The pain in my shoulder powered the rage coursing through me.
“Then we won’t have to worry how messy this gets.”
Her feet slid on the ground, smearing streaks of red and black fluids. She fell twice, and I dragged her limp body along the floor. After the second time, I kicked her in the ribs, whispered some horrible quiet threats in her ear that shocked even me. We were getting close to the end of the hallway—another fifty feet, twenty feet. A new, astringent smell closed in around us as we came to the darkened threshold of my old office. I herded the Kraken in front of us.
Mary nodded. Taking a deep breath, I shoved our new hostage through the doorway, and we followed her, guns drawn. The Kraken stumbled and fell to the floor. We traced the darkness with our fingers on the triggers.
“Step into my office, Dr. Barnes,” said a voice from the area of the desk. The tiny green glow of an Atman popped in the darkness, and over it loomed the vague shadowy face of Fujimi, lit strangely from underneath.
We aimed our guns. He only smiled. It had to be a trap. I looked around but saw nothing in the darkness.
“Come in, Doctor. You too, Mrs. Barnes,” Fujimi said. “Have a seat. I haven’t set any traps. We have some things to talk about.”
Silence—no movement. The Kraken groaned and gurgled softly on the floor. I stooped to haul her up again.
“Don’t bother,” Fujimi said loudly. “She’s not much use as a hostage, since she can die, for all I care.”
Fujimi set the Atman down on the desk, which threw a pale green light across the room.
“Now please lower the guns and have a seat.”
“Why would we do that?” Mary said, squinting down the pistol sight.
“Well,” Fujimi said, his finger hovering over the glowing screen. “If you were to do something rash, then I would have to do something equally rash.”
His finger circled over the pulsing Atman.
“What is that?” I said, the hair on my neck prickling even as the question left my lips.
“That’s what I want to talk about,” Fujimi said. “And you must admit—you’re curious about why I don’t feel I need a conventional weapon right now. So you may as well sit down and talk this over with me. I might have just what the doctor ordered, you might say. Something to counteract what you’re injected with, Dr. Barnes.”
Mary and I exchanged glances. We edged slowly around the Kraken toward the chairs, our eyes now accustomed to the dark. We sat. Nothing happened—no traps or ambushes sprung at us. I stared at Fujimi’s shadow-crossed face. In the soft green luminescence, I saw little striations along the ridge of his skull line. They were like sores, but they looked darker, and deeper.
“You don’t look well yourself, Doctor,” I said, gun on my knee, finger still on the trigger guard.
“Oh—this,” Fujimi said, scratching at the biggest divot of all, above his right eyebrow. It scraped off like a massive zit, oozing some dark fluids. He wiped it on my old desk blotter. “It’s nothing. Just a side effect from one of the vaccines.
“You see, I was ready for an eventual security breach. I always told the Bureau administrators down in Washington that a no-name hospital in New Jersey wasn’t the best place to conduct vital Project weapons tests, but they never listened to me. So I took my own precautions.”
He winked, jostling loose a flap of flesh from the hole in his brow. He reached to the desk, and Mary pointed the gun at him. Fujimi’s hand paused. He smiled and pointed toward a half-full tumbler on the desk. Slowly, he took it in his hand and lifted it to his lips. He drank deeply. His other hand was still poised over the Atman’s touch screen, his fingers cool as a gunslinger’s, and still as a surgeon’s. Something hung in the balance. We had a stand-off. Fujimi set the glass back down.
“What’s with the Atman?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level.
“Getting a bit ahead of ourselves, aren’t we, Doctor?” Fujimi said, twirling his fingers in the emerald glow. “As doctors, don’t we start at the beginning, when it comes to a prognosis?”
Silence.
“Go on,” I said.
“First off, most of what dear, departed Cornelius Wetherspoon probably told you about the Bureau is true,” Fujimi said. “But he’s also been out of the loop for quite some time, so he doesn’t know any of the latest developments.”
“Latest developments,” Mary repeated.
“As in, the coming war,” Fujimi said. “All the armies of the globe are converging, as we speak, on a tiny peninsula in Asia. They’re going to play out their little war games to determine who controls the world’s prosperity for the next century. I’m sure you heard Saxas blathering on and on over the last few days. Tensions have never been higher.”
“The Bureau is deploying to Korea,” I said.
“Dr. Barnes, you’re an intelligent man,” Fujimi said, reaching again for the glass. “You already see where this is going.”
“Where is this going?” Mary said.
The glass shook, rattling ice cubes, in Fujimi’s hand.
“Where this is going, Mrs. Barnes, is that this country has been preparing for the next big conflagration since the last big conflagration. There’s been a hundred years of research and development all leading to this. We will ensure American and Japanese interests are safe.”
“They’re going to release an electronic virus against our enemies in Korea,” I said. “Hell, it’s not the first time the bastards have used germs in a war there.”
Fujimi laughed. It was a harsh, grating sound.
“That’s part of it, Doctor,” he said. “You’ve learned quite a bit about Project 137, haven’t you? But you still don’t know everything.”
He chuckled, reached again for the tumbler. With a free finger he pointed at me. But he coughed, a deep cough that rumbled something loose in his chest. He hacked violently. The cubes rattled hard in the glass, some falling out and onto the floor.
Mary and I glanced at each other. Mary’s latexed finger quivered near her trigger. Fujimi’s hand was still steady, just inches over the glowing Atman. If one of us shot him, that hand would fall right onto the touch screen. I waved her off. She untensed, and I breathed deeply. Fujimi stopped coughing, gargled the liquor, then spat down between his legs onto the floor. A metallic clang reverberated.
“Spittoon,” Fujimi said, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, tipping the last of the drink down his throat. “When I moved in, I thought it would be a nice American touch to a bland office, with your kitschy religious sculptures, these pictures of your Maruta.”
“Patients, Fujimi. Patients whose lives I saved.”
Fujimi smiled. He set the glass down.
“Yes—that’s nice. But we’re off track, aren’t we?” he said. “We were talking about the totality of Project 137. And you were cu
rious about what’s on this screen. With a little tap of my finger here, a virus gets uploaded to every fourth-generation Atman on Earth.” He laughed.
“The same virus you released before?” I said.
“The same, but different,” Fujimi said, picking up a pen and scratching his scalp. When he set it down, a clump of desiccated flesh was stuck to the end, and a foul odor wafted through the room. “More widespread, and virulent. More effective.”
“So anyone with a new Atman is going to die,” Mary said.
“Almost one-hundred percent of them. But each of the earlier three generations processes the same virus in different ways. The first generation produces a flu-like germ with a mortality rate of ten to twenty percent. The second generation produces a more-extreme kind of fever, violent psychosis, a death rate of one in three. The third acts like a flesh-eating virus in only a small minority of the Maruta. Really, it’s only the fourth that causes wholesale death. Like a fast-acting Ebola. Within minutes, in most cases.”
“Don’t different countries have different versions of the Atman—” I stared to say.
“You catch on quickly, Dr. Barnes,” Fujimi said. “Yes, the upload I have right now at my fingertips will only kill some hundreds of thousands in, say, the United States and Japan. That’ll be the collateral damage.”
He smiled. But then his face turned down in a grimace.
“Europe won’t fare as well—some millions will die. Africa will probably have the biggest die-off since colonialism, too. But it’s mainland Asia, from China and Mongolia down into Indochina, over to Afghanistan and India, which has the most fourth-generation devices. Heady days of famine and death are coming soon. It should soften the continent up nicely for the next phase of this war.”
My mouth hung open, flabbergasted, as these perverse words tumbled out of the madman’s mouth. Such sweeping scale, just offhanded indifference to the coming Armageddon. At first, I could think of nothing to say. But after some seconds, I mustered a question.
“What’s the death toll?”
“At the Bureau, we prefer the term ‘cull count,’” Fujimi said, smile twitching at his lips. “I wouldn’t hazard a guess. More of the enemy than of us. Many more. And that’s what counts.”
Fujimi coughed again.
“No matter how you look at it, the next ten years will be fascinating days for the historians—if there are any left,” he said. “We’ve been overdue for a world conflict for quite some time, especially since the Blackout wiped out accurate accounts of the 20th century. The time is now, the moment is ripe.”
“The end,” I mumbled. A metallic taste filled my mouth.
“It’s going to be the culmination of long years of research and diplomacy,” Fujimi said, wagging his finger. “The work my former self started more than a hundred years ago. America is the only reason the world flourished over the last hundred years. It gave me a chance to continue my legacy. The only place that would allow cloning, and the research to proceed.”
“Cloning?” I said. “Former self?”
Fujimi grinned, shook his head.
“Perhaps I said too much,” Fujimi said. He grabbed at the corner of his lip, twisting a moustache that wasn’t there. “You should be feeling rather ill, Dr. Barnes. Would you like something to ease the pain?”
I turned my head, and the room wheeled all around me. My eyes burned. The gun in Mary’s hand twitched, but I waved her off. I just had to get Fujimi to pull his hand away, to let down his guard for a moment. I needed that one moment of opportunity.
“I don’t have an Atman,” I said, stalling him. “I can’t have the Tojo Virus.”
“Yes, that’s true, you don’t have an Atman,” Fujimi said. “But the electric virus had to have a biological precursor. About fifteen years ago, we perfected the organic strain of the Tojo agent. It was engineered to act like Ebola—but it was too unpredictable for weapons purposes. Our dearly departed colleague on the floor there injected you with that early version. Not elegant, but I would say it will do the trick.”
The room spun harder as I glanced over at the lifeless form of the Kraken. Mary’s rubber hand slipped into mine. The room seemed brighter, somehow. I could feel my eyes searing in my skull, the room swimming in delirious waves. I could feel my flesh burning from the inside. I knew for the first time the hand of death. Fujimi’s voice made my brain wobble. I focused again on Suzanne Kranklein’s corpse on the floor. She had contracted the electronic virus maybe an hour before. How long would it take? I could have mere moments, or maybe days. Or perhaps Fujimi was lying again, a madman playing a poker hand with the chips down. I felt unconsciousness closing slowly over me.
“The plan is all ready to go into effect,” Fujimi said, still talking. “The war begins, and we start with a magnificent advantage. We’ve got cures and vaccines up our sleeves. Cures for cancers, genetic fountains of youth. The answers to a billion DNA riddles. The Bureau of Wellness has only been waiting for the bloodletting to unveil all sorts of medical miracles.
“The second Pax Americana will be a true paradise—a culled population, plenty of food, plenty of medicine, enlightenment,” he added, his voice becoming a harsh rasp. “It will be a place on earth for the true believers. The best people, selected for their value to the country. The Bureau will make sure of that.”
My ears rang—perhaps another symptom of the pathogen surging in my veins. Fujimi’s words echoed in his head. Plenty of medicine, true believers, the ones who survive.
My eyes flamed. Sight and sound blurred—the world was closing shut. But the tremors wracking my body were as much from rage as they were from the virus. I could barely see the scab who sat in my chair, the murderer who had caused untold suffering, who had beheaded a young girl in the name of science. The killer who had orphaned an awkward teenager twenty years before.
In one motion, without aim, I swung the gun up and squeezed the trigger.
It was a perfect shot. The bullet punched through Fujimi’s trachea. A panicked look crossed his face as his eyes bulged in disbelief, and his hand fell onto the Atman touch-screen. The blood spurted from the hold in his throat as he gurgled. He reached for his glass, then crumpled sideways to the floor. I had dropped the gun after the recoil, but I stumbled up, leaning heavily on the desk, and grabbed for the Atman. I couldn’t see the screen, but I picked it up. It was so heavy. Finally, I could read the words.
“Upload beginning,” it said.
The superbug was being injected out into cyberspace, then pumped to the hearts and brains of billions, I knew. The meter clicked up—first at ten, then twenty-five, then thirty-five percent.
I tapped at the screen, frantically fumbling, trying to kill the program. At my feet, Fujimi choked and drowned in his own blood. I kicked him once with the last of my rage but focused on the screen in front of me.
The machine asked for a password. I knew it had to be the forbidden code word.
MERUDA, I typed in.
Wrong password.
I smacked my face with my palm.
Fifty-five percent.
MARUTA, I corrected myself, cursing.
Wrong password.
The meter crept up to sixty, seventy, then eighty percent. The green bar neared its end.
Upload nearly complete, it said.
I stumbled, knocking the Atman a bit to the one side. But something had stopped it from sliding across the blotter. Blindly I ran my hand over the edges of the machine—and my fingers closed around a cord. A wire running from the flashing uploading Atman, off into the darkness of the office somewhere. My brain was whirling, but I yanked it.
The screen went black—completely dead. Perhaps the virus had killed the machine, I thought dreamily. I felt unsteady on my feet, like I was about to fall. We had failed, and an apocalypse was nigh. I shut my eyes.
But then something tapped me on the forehead. I looked up drunkenly. It was a plug. Mary’s hand held the end of a power cord in front of my face. Despite my weakening
eyes, I saw her wide grin.
“For being a genius, the guy was pretty stupid, running on auxiliary power,” she said. “You stopped him, Joe.”
I smiled. I was so sleepy. I tried to smile, but I felt a tickle at the sides of my mouth, and I saw my wife’s eyes open in horror, her mouth shouting something. My eyes rolled back in my head, and I collapsed face down on my old desk.
THE DREAM OF THE DEEP
Water compressed my face. My lungs burned. The darkness was total, once again. I waited for the cavernous deep, the bowels of the fish, to rise from the depths and swallow me whole. The fight in me was gone, my limbs formless, my form amorphous. I was sick and dying. So I went limp, surrendering to the all-consuming void.
But then—air. The water parted from my eyes and cheeks and mouth, and I gasped, drawing in huge sucking breaths.
A great shaking, a trembling reverberated through me.
Then there was light. Brighter and brighter, totally blinding. It flickered.
My eyes opened. I awakened.
I was in a car. The backseat of a car. The sun in the upside-down window overhead burning my cheeks. The shadows of trees whipped past, rippling the rays of light. Warm and fuzzy, a bit numb, and soundless. The car hit something, bouncing me hard in the seat. Suddenly I heard tinkling, the clatter of a million pieces of metal. My head ached, throbbed.
“What—the—hell,” I said.
“Awake—finally. Thank God, thank God,” Mary’s voice said from somewhere.
I turned my head, and Mary was in the driver’s seat, steering the car, reaching up and angling down the rearview mirror to get a better look at me. Her eyes were raw, red. and wet in the reflection.
“Mary,” I said, my voice dry and cracked.
“You were sick, and you got better,” she said. “Just close your eyes and rest. We’ll stop for the night soon. I’ll tell you then.”
She kept checking the sideview mirrors, checking the traffic behind them.
“But Mary—”
“Shush and get some rest,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything once we get somewhere safe.”
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