Musílkova 27, Prague, Czech Republic
November 30
“Mama!” Eva gasped, running. She grabbed her mother’s shoulders tightly, brushed her hair back, held back tears.
Her mother stared blankly at the ceiling, her face aged, worn, and two long cuts on her cheeks half-healed. An IV strung up and out of her arm, saline dripping in like a heartbeat. She was restrained, but she made no move to escape, and at once, Eva started fighting with the straps, trying to undo them, let her free.
A large hand wrapped around hers.
“You don’t want to do that,” Dmitri said. “She doesn’t do well when she’s free.”
Eva held her mother’s hand gently, stroked it.
“What did you do to her?” she whispered.
“She’s got what you’ve got, but it’s much worse. We gave her one of those cocktails about twenty minutes ago, and this… this is as good as it gets with her. She’s not really conscious unless she’s full-on sick, and that’s not a pleasant place for her to be.
“I know you don’t trust us, that you don’t want to help us… but Eva, babe, if you don’t fix this thing for us, this is going to be you in three weeks. This, or worse.”
Eva saw two suited men carrying in an incubator, setting it on the table and plugging it in. She looked back to her mother, rested her head against the blank, scarred face.
“I don’t know how to do it,” she cried softly.
“You keep sayin’ that, and it sounds just like Rhodri, back at the start. But he picked it up real fast. And from what I hear, he wasn’t half the bright one that you are.”
“Don’t these incubators have some kind of… automated system? Something more reliable than human trial-and-error? Anything else?”
“Could be,” sniffed Dmitri. “Might be a software patch somewhere I don’t know about since the manufacturers have all been out of business for years!”
Eva looked to the incubator, eyes shot with tears.
“What if I screw it up? You really want to take that chance?”
Dmitri punched the incubator on, the screen flickering to life. He dusted off her chair, turned it.
“Give it a go, let me know what you think.”
He nodded to her, and she reluctantly sat on the chair, touched the trackpad and began investigating the incubator’s software. A large, simple window opened, happily showing a stylized molecule, and welcomed her to the world of personalized bio-engineering. A small alert flashed before her, giving her the “Tip of the Day”:
The results pane at the bottom of the screen shows you the outcome of your work against the most common blood samples for your geographic location. To test against other locales, please choose “Edit Locale…” under the “Profiles” menu.
She clicked “dismiss”, got a lay of the land. Dmitri reached a finger in, pushed the screen as he talked.
“I’m no genius, but what Rhodri told me is this: You load in a blood sample here, and it does up a nice doodle of what the virus looks like. So let’s give this a go, load up one of the samples we’ve got.”
He swatted her hands off the trackpad, navigated a few menus until a complex string of different-coloured rectangles filled the middle pane of the screen, faux-glossy and inviting, like a children’s puzzle game and not a matter of life or death.
“You seem pretty good at this,” Eva remarked. “Why don’t you find the cure yourself?”
Dmitri smirked.
“Just cause I can print, don’t mean I can write. Look here… left side, this is your toolset. There are, what, about a hundred different things you can drag around and slap together. Me, I don’t know shit about this, so I just make the prettiest little chain I can figure. So let’s try the red square, the blue diamond, and the… yellow whatsitcalled.”
“Trapezoid.”
“Bless you. Now see…”
Dmitri demonstrated his new creation in the top pane, the background a calm sea blue with animated bubbles creeping up. Almost pleasant. Eva sighed at it all.
“Now we hit this button here… ‘test’… and…”
Dmitri’s structure melded itself together, grew stems connecting some elements, and then a set of arrows appeared between the top and middle panes, suggesting the application of the first to the second. After a moment or two, new shapes and colours fell from the middle pane into the bottom, and the window’s frame turned red. A warning flashed on the side of the screen:
4 Alerts Reported:
Patient dies of massive internal haemorrhaging;
patient suffers severe stroke;
patient may experience vision loss;
patient may exhibit rash.
Eva cocked an eyebrow, and Dmitri sighed.
“Believe it or not, this is better than usual. Last time it told me I’d successfully constructed Ebola. That was a good day, let me tell you.”
Eva shook her head, hit the ‘clear’ button and Dmitri’s creation disappeared. She pointed at the toolset, scrolling down the list, incredulous.
“I don’t know why you thought I’d be good at this,” she said. “This is a stupidly complex program to figure out. Look at all these things… I don’t know what even a fraction of these mean!”
“The incubators were made for pharmacists, I think. They kind of assume you know a bit about medicine or something.”
“Which I don’t.”
“But neither did Rhodri. And what he told me… he said the only things you really need to worry about are the first twenty shapes. The rest are compounds, and you can live without ‘em. He said that when you really get down to it, this is like any other program. Forget about the molecules or the blood samples or any of that crap, and just treat it like what you know.”
Eva shook her head sadly.
“I’ll screw it up,” she said.
“Then it’ll tell you. And you start over. It doesn’t require skill, it just requires a brain that can think a certain way. And yours does that.”
Eva sighed, moved a red square over to the compound in the middle, and watched part of the structure crumble.
“Hey cool, real-time,” exclaimed Dmitri. “Didn’t know you could do that! See? You’re a natural!”
Eva slammed her fist down on the desk, turned on Dmitri.
“What happened with Rhodri?” she demanded. “He was good! He was good, and somehow you corrupted him, made him do this! What in the hell did you do to him?”
Dmitri placed a heavy hand on Eva’s shoulder.
“Less chatter. More working. We don’t have all day here. You’re due to start flaking out in ninety-some minutes, and I don’t have an infinite supply of that cocktail if I’m feeding three people at once.”
Eva hesitated, as if she might refuse, but then slowly turned back to the incubator, put her hands on the trackpad, and began to work. Dmitri leaned back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, arms behind his head.
Eva began by figuring out the effect of each shape in her palette. The red squares chipped away at certain parts of Nuremberg-6, but left other by-products behind. The yellow circles helped with others, but again, let dangerous elements fall. She tried pairing a red square with a yellow circle, and it did eat up most of the usual suspects, but then it left a shower of purple squares that did more damage than anything before.
After some work, she found a way to embed a trio of shapes inside a container, which was attached as a subset of another element. This one lead to no fall-out, but it made Nuremberg-6 split in two, each piece much more immediately dangerous than mere delirium. She made a more complex compound, creating depths and depths of embedded elements, trying to catch every bit, stop them from falling into the bottom of the screen.
Dmitri watched her work, held his breath every time the machine processed results, sighed quietly every time it returned a death sentence. He didn’t speak a word, just sat beside her, observing.
Eventually the compound was too big to fit on the screen, and she scrapped it all, starting with a single purple circle, and built more streamlined functions around the core. The results were discouraging, but after a while, she started to see a pattern emerging… she clasped her hands together, leaned back from the table.
“What?” Dmitri asked, waking from a stupor. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“I’m close, I think,” Eva said, eyes fixed on the shapes. “I think this is close.”
“You’ve got four big chunks of it that kill the patient more ways than I can count,” he complained. “I think you and me have different definitions of ‘close’.”
“Ignore that. Look at how it works… I’m breaking it up so this red, this blue… see? They don’t stay together. They were causing the strokes. I’m splitting it up so the worst parts don’t survive. Then all I need to do is beat those four compounds, and… and…”
“And we’ve got a cure?” Dmitri said, hopeful.
“I don’t know. But it’s the best I’ve got right now.”
“Eva!” called her mother suddenly, seizing up, trying to escape her restraints. Dmitri and Eva ran to her side; he tightened the straps while Eva stroked her hair.
“Mama? Mama, can you hear me?”
“Eva! Someone find Eva! She’s all alone in the bath!”
Her mother wasn’t looking at her at all, she was in her own world, and it made Eva shiver to remember the feeling. Dmitri checked her IV, shook his head.
“She’s coming out of it early. We need another cocktail.”
“Somebody help me! She might have drowned! Someone please give me a ride home before she drowns!”
Eva turned away, back to the incubator. Dmitri opened the door, leaned out, frowning. The hall was empty. He took his phone from his jacket, hit a button.
“Where is everyone?” he barked in heavily-accented English. “We need another…”
He trailed off, listening, then nodded.
“Be right there. Somebody get a new cocktail down to Kolikov. I’m locking them in.”
He looked back to Eva, the door half-closed. She darted nervous glances between him and her mother, who was starting to fight harder against her restraints, crying at the imagined fear of losing a child.
“Sit tight,” Dmitri said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Just concentrate on the virus and ignore her, got it?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just ran out the door, locking it behind him.
Eva took her mother’s strapped hand in hers, stroked it warmly.
“Mama, I’m here. It’s Eva.”
“Eva, my baby!” her mother screamed. “She’s drowning, my baby! Why did he leave her alone like that?”
“It’ll be okay, mama. I’m going to take care of it.”
Eva threw herself back at the incubator, dragging shapes in and out of the structure, breaking bits, shattering structures, cutting away at the most deadly bits. Six warnings, five warnings, four, and three… she had the thing on the ropes, but it kept tossing out surprises, things she couldn’t decipher. She slammed her hand against the desk, furious, and her mother whimpered.
“Die, damn you. Just die…” she sighed, lowering her head. Warm hands wrapped over her shoulders, began to massage her tense muscles. She sighed happily, nodded.
“Feels good,” she said, looking back at the screen as the hands kept working.
She drew down another compound, tried it, and it worked. She gasped, elated, and began to fight off the last two survivors of Nuremberg-6: fatal stroke and fatal fever. She tossed shapes across the screen with amazing dexterity, the stress melting from her body, her hands feeling warm for the first time in days…
“I’ve got you now,” she growled to the virus.
Strong arms wrapped around her shoulders, but she kept working, taking their energy and using it. She felt breath on her neck, then the brush of beard, and a kiss on her ear. She shivered, closed her eyes a moment, just a moment, let the kiss linger.
“You miss me,” whispered Rhodri softly.
“I miss you,” Eva replied.
A hand slid up, up around her neck, caressing her, fingers touching her lips. She held her breath, her hands falling away from the trackpad, touched the arms, held them there, turning her head to him, desperate, desperate…
“You need me,” Rhodri whispered.
“I do. I need you,” she answered.
“Then why,” he breathed, his mouth close to hers. “Why did you leave me?”
The hand at her neck tightened suddenly, fingers digging sharp into her skin, and she convulsed, but he held her tight in his arms, keeping her there, locked in a killing embrace, and he dug his nails into her skin, dragging up and down, then moved gently to her ear, beard rough and scratching.
“You should have stayed,” he growled.
Eva trembled, her head up and her neck exposed, and she tried to see behind her, tried to see him.
“You’re not real,” she cried. “You’re not here. Dmitri locked the door.”
“I have a key,” he hissed. “You can’t keep me out.”
“You don’t have a key. This is the virus. You’re not here.”
He laughed at her, moved around to her other side, still holding her tight, and bit the edge of her ear.
“If I weren’t real,” he said. “Then how could I do this?”
She felt her neck released, and a sharp burn shot across her cheek. She grabbed at it, felt the sting, checked her fingertips and saw blood. She gasped, squeezed her hand into a fist.
“Why would you leave me?” Rhodri asked, moving back to her other side, his hand tracing down her face, her neck, like a lover’s caress, but evil.
“You know why,” she spat. “It’s this. This and all those other viruses you made.”
He laughed, nuzzled close to her neck.
“You know I made them because of you,” he whispered. “I dreamed them up while we made love.”
She shook her head, but he grabbed it, held it steady.
“You were my greatest inspiration,” he sang almost. “My muse. You made these viruses. They’re yours.”
Eva’s hands hit the table, the trackpad, and then her eyes opened, but narrow.
“I didn’t make them,” she said cooly. “But I will destroy them. Just try and stop me.”
She looked forward, despite his hands, reached hers to the trackpad and moved the blocks around, shifting at a furious pace; breaking compounds, catching fall-out… Rhodri couldn’t stop her, his arms unable to shift her determination, his hands stroking her body top to bottom, trying to dislodge her concentration… She fought past it, fixing errors and finally, finally, leaving the cure with only one side-effect.
“Fatal stroke,” Rhodri laughed, kissing her neck. “You’ll never beat me, Eva. You never could.”
“You never saw what I can do,” she said, and drew a yellow rectangle over the last compound, hanging it over, pausing. Her mother sang a quiet lullaby, Rhodri licked her jaw sweetly, and she… she let the last piece fall.
The bottom pane glowed green, ran a notice saying: “Minor side-effects: raised blood pressure”. Eva gasped, shoved back from the table, hands in the air.
“I did it!” she exclaimed, and her mother laughed out at the same time, but for unknown reasons. She hit the ‘save’ button, then another marked ‘process’, and she saw a vial of serum in the incubator’s central chamber slide into place and start to churn slowly. She pressed her palms to her eyes, holding back a laugh of joy, listening as the cure was made.
When she opened her eyes again, Rhodri was right before her, scowling.
“You bitch!” he screamed, and grabbed her head with both hands, scraping at her. She kicked and pushed and fell back off the chair, scrambling back to the wall, and Rhodri stormed her, grabbing at her legs, pulling her towards him, psychotic and maniacal and so unfamiliar all she could was scream.
The door burst open suddenly, and Dmitri was there, flanked by two guards. He looked to Eva’s mother, crying in her stretcher, and then down to Eva, and in a flash he shot across the room, needle at the ready, and pushed her down onto her side, jabbing the point into her arm, and she felt it, felt the rush again…
“He came back,” she gasped, face ground into the tile. “He came back. You said I had hours. What… what happened?”
Dmitri kept her there, but his lock was almost gentle.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Might be the Tezocet again, or the damn thing might be mutating as it spreads.”
Eva nodded as best she could, looked forward and saw Rhodri there, lying on the ground with her, his hand stroking her cheek.
“Shh,” he said, smiling. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”
Eva looked away from him, grunted.
“I did it,” she said. “I broke the virus. Check the machine.”
Dmitri shook, looked back, then leaned in to Eva.
“You still see him?” he asked.
Eva looked across the room. Rhodri licked his lips at her.
“No,” she lied. “No, he’s gone.”
Dmitri got up quickly, moved to the incubator and checked the progress bar as it crept across the screen. It chimed happily, and the serum tube rotated around, then emptied itself into a small container at the base of the machine. An orange cap attached, and with a hiss, the work was done. Dmitri picked it up as if it were the most valuable thing in the world.
“I’ve got to go use this,” he said to Eva, pocketing it. “You stay put.”
“Go? Wait, I thought this was for my mother! You said I was helping my mother!”
Dmitri shrugged, the door half-closed.
“You are,” he said. “But she don’t pay my bills. So she can wait a bit. The both of you can.”
And he closed the door, leaving her alone with her comatose mother and the ghostly Rhodri, who watched her hungrily from the corner.
