If anyone ever doubted whether or not 1s and 0s, cars, bikes, AGCTs, or water could flow in ways other than by the logic of the grid, all they had to do was watch traffic in India or China or Vietnam: motor scooters would force a break in traffic to cross, snarls developed then untangled within seconds…. Leaving the snarl to enter the wet market, Ah Lam soon found herself navigating crates, stalls, cages, and tubs holding live chickens, fish, crabs, scorpions, pigs, monkeys, dogs, turtles, frogs, privet cats, wild ducks, geese, pheasants, and so many other animals howling, mewing, braying, clucking….
Bai peeked out from behind the poster that the government made him put on his stall, warning of avian flu.
When Bai saw Ah Lam, he motioned her inside, and after looking both ways, she slipped in to inspect the exotic animals crammed into his small shop: soft-shelled turtles from Sumatra; parrots from Paraguay; pangolins from Vietnam; pythons from Myanmar, and red-eared sliders from the U.S.A. They had to be careful. The government tried to keep him from selling his animals; they said having cages of animals on top of each other, chickens shitting down onto ducks, ducks shitting on the pigeons below them, was unclean. But Bai’s family has been selling exotic animals for generations and he knew far better than men in offices that all animals are unclean. And Ah Lam knew that there is no better cure for liver problems than the bile of a black bear; that there is no better cure for poor circulation than eating seahorses; no meat fresher than that from an animal that has been slaughtered in front of her. And that she wouldn’t know how she would live if she didn’t have her own business mailing animal cures to America, Africa, Australia, and Europe....
At Olympia’s request, Dr. Karen Kitlaus created a bird-to-mammal virus. Olympia said she’d have her own people do it, but the biohazard containment lab being built in her building was behind schedule and she didn’t want to wait. Already she was at the stage where they could start plugging data into modeling programs, and it would help to have some models of what a bird-to-mammal disease mutation might look like. So as a favor, Dr. Kitlaus had her technicians take human flu of H3N2 strain and samples of H5N1 collected back in 1997. They infected a ferret to see what would happen. Would the infected ferret infect other ferrets in the same cage? Could it spread if the ferrets exchanged saliva? By licking each other or sharing food? Would it attach to receptors in the mammal’s noses and throats and so be easily spread by sneezing? Or would it mutate into something that could only live deep in the lungs, like in the outbreaks in Azerbaijan and Iraq in 2006, something that even heavy coughing had a hard time spreading?
Whatever her results, they were sure to be worse out in nature, nature’s laboratory infinite compared to the artificial conditions of a lab. Under the controlled conditions of the lab, the disease could only spread via one path: ferret to ferret. But in the wild, it could go from ferret to ferret, but also ferret to mouse to owl to ferret; it could develop a completely unanticipated route, like the Leucochloridium paradoxum, a parasite that infests snails: one mutation causes the eyes of the infested snail to bulge out of its head; another causes the snail, a ground dweller, to climb to the light, scaling reeds to get as high as possible. By the time it reaches the top, its eyeballs look like long, wiggling caterpillars, the favorite food of Jays. The birds devour the eyes of the snails, and thus ingest the parasite. Inside the Jay, the Leucochioridium paradoxum matures, then releases its eggs into the rectum of the bird, which the bird shits out, down onto the forest floor where other snails eat it, become infected, the ability of a virus to try all doors as infinite as its patience, shape-shifting as easily as water seeking its own level.
When Dr. Kitlaus went into the animal area to see how her ferrets were doing, she noticed the smell first. They were all dead. Dead ferrets lay about in their cages. And not just in the cage of the one she had infected, but all of the ferrets in all of the cages.