“Hey Gabriella, you hear about the cat?” Jak asked. He was referring to the dead cat that was discovered in Germany, a lab test revealing avian flu in its corpse. Everyone in influenza labs had their panties in a twist because this was the first instance of the virus killing a mammal. The hope lay in the fact that the WHO couldn’t determine whether the cat died from a virus that had mutated to mammals—one step closer to humans—or whether the death was merely poetic justice, the bird that the cat ate taking the cat with it to the grave. Meadow, and the rest of the world were hoping for the ‘poetic justice theory’. “Yeah, well, no need to panic,” she said. “Cats do eat a lot a birds.”
She was right of course. But watching the plague move from China to Vietnam to Romania and now Western Europe, it began to dawn on Jak how flimsy the story he’d told himself had actually been: in it, he’d have time to prepare. He’d watch the human variety nearing, like an army of zombies in a MMORPG, the kind that moved slow and always walked in front of your gun—and then, once it arrived in North America, he’d act. He’d buy N95s and wear them more conscientiously than condoms. He’d seal off the bathroom in his apartment, turn it into a live-in biohazard containment room if it came to that.
But thinking more soberly now, he realized that if a plague broke out again, it would be different from those in the past—and everywhere all at once—humans in jumbo jets traveling much faster than migrating birds, carrying the virus into every artery of human communication. People used to think they didn’t share a body. And maybe once that was true. But with people burning coal and the mercury going into the ocean and the fish eating the mercury and the people eating the fish, and plants carrying human DNA, and everyone breathing the same air, there wasn’t even any separation between people and animals, let alone each other.
He and his buddies had had a laugh after the last scare when one of them confessed that once he thought the end was near, he had hoarded gold. Yeah, the good news is, you got all the gold in the world, they’d laughed, but the bad news is that there’s nowhere to spend it. It’s said that people reveal themselves in their ultimate concerns, the philosopher among them said sagely. And they laughed when another confessed that he had hoarded beer, laughing more, when a third said toilet paper, and the fourth ammunition. After this last had spoken, they stopped laughing, and looked at one another as they never had before.
The government solution, he’d read while standing sardine tight in a subway can: civilians are advised to maintain a separation of three meters between one another.
We Cover the Earth—said the logo of a paint company, an icon that could be used as a logo for the flu as well, complete coverage measured in hours.
When the agents showed up at her office, Olympia got the kind of chill that comes from inside. She moved some books off the extra chairs so they’d have a place to sit, then sat at her desk acting cool though her mind raced with all the reasons that what she was doing was perfectly legal. Then they began asking about Mohammed. They weren’t interested in her or copyright infringement at all, only in Mohammed, and she tried to not let her relief show.
It wasn’t like him to not show up at work, she told them. And he hadn’t been in for four days. When they tried calling his cell, all they got was his voice mail.
“Is he in some kind of trouble,” she asked, meaning, Am I in some kind of trouble because of him?
Instead of answering, the man, an agent from the Dept. of Agriculture, asked, “Can we see his computer?” The warrant he pulled out let Olympia know the question was rhetorical.
After they left, taking the computer with them, Olympia sat in her office wondering what it could all mean. They never asked her if she knew where he was, meaning, she surmised, that they knew where he was. If they weren’t holding him somewhere he would have at least called. But why? Was he mixed up in some terrorist shit? Mistaken for someone who was? Extreme vetting often meant people were held for months, even years, without ever being charged with anything. Disappeared, it used to be called.
Then a horrible thought came to her. Had they arrested him because he was trying to sell her data? Had he copied his hard drive and peddled their gene library to Big Pharma? Or, more likely, offered it as a perk to whatever company would hire him? She knew of several PIs who had a story like that and always it starred someone like him: a postdoc working way below grade because he depended on green-card renewals, or some such, a family back in some foreign country, depending on the money he sent home. Maybe a boss he was pissed at. Her? Unlike Jak, Meadow, and Gabe, Mohammed never said anything directly, but when she retracted the article, she could tell he was pissed. Like Meadow, he had been counting on having his name on the publication.
Jak, Gabe, Silpa, and Meadow stood around looking at the empty spot on the lab bench where Mohammed’s computer had been, talking about the FBI agents who had taken it, asking each other and themselves Why? No one could figure it out. They kept looking back to the spot where it had been, a clean footprint in the dust on the bench.
“Maybe he tried to leave the country with our data?” Jak said.
“Oh right,” Gabe said, “like a half-completed Phthiraptera gene library’s a state secret.”
“Maybe customs agents mistook it for bomb data.”
“Ha,” pause, “ha,” Gabe laughed to show how stupid that was.
But Jak shot back, “You don’t know. You don’t know what we really could be working on. None of us do. The project is getting military money. Maybe the government is planning to take our lice data and use it for some kind of biological weapon.”
The comment gave them all pause. Every tech had a friend or a friend of a friend who came to realize they were working on a piece of a project that could be used for fertilizer or to break down oil spills, but could also be used to stabilize a detonator, or even more evil, unimaginable shit. It was part of the turf.
“Yeah, no one ever went around the rules,” Gabe said sarcastically, and Meadow wondered if Gabe was including herself. Everyone knew how raw she was about picking up a ‘dead’ strain of Malaria. ‘Fuck it, fuck it all,’ she’d said. Then Chen’s data had gone wonky. But she wouldn’t sabotage the study, would she?—it was just a manner of speaking—the way someone who’s angry says, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ without actually meaning it. But she wouldn’t let it go, blaming the lab though she’d never been able to prove it, even after Compliance had been called in. The fact that they hadn’t been able to find anything only convinced her all the more that there was some sort of conspiracy, or shadow study, or something that had kept it off the books. Not, as Compliance concluded, a stray had gotten in.
She exchanged a knowing look with Silpa, Silpa willing to believe anything about governments after having a complete blackout on information about Guy. She’d begun spending hours searching for him online. Some mornings she showed up bleary eyed from not having slept the night before.
The others were deep into details that could be evidence for motives Mohammed might have had to steal data that might or might not have military uses: his family back in Bahrain or Venezuela, or the pride he had, or how neat he kept everything…. As a group they realized what they were doing when Silpa exclaimed, “Now you all have gone off the deep end.” Silpa wanted to believe there was nothing to the idea that 1) they might actually be working on a military project; and 2) Mohammed was A) a terrorist, or B) a criminal. The most innocent detail could be used against a foreigner, she knew. Or anyone. And she told them so.
Jak continued pumping life into his conspiracy theory, the others now arguing against it, either out of wishful thinking, or because they really did believe that a vaccine that helped an invading army didn’t make them weapons researchers….
Meadow wasn’t sure what to believe, except that above Mohammed’s spot on the bench was a photo of his wife and son. And she knew he wouldn’t have left on his own without that.