Immortality (45 page)

Memories of the previous night came back to him. He carefully got up and retrieved his shorts and jeans. While dressing, his gaze returned to her. She was so attractive. She stirred a little as if she knew he was looking at her and then returned to her dreams. They had both ended up so drunk last night. He remembered feeling they were each trying to find enough nerve in the alcohol to do what they had finally done. He was in the cobwebs of a mild hangover and was worried he’d made a mistake. He looked at her sleeping face and was drawn to her; no, last night had not been a mistake.

He set up the pot to make some coffee and went to wash up. When he came out of the bathroom, she was still asleep. He poured her a mug of coffee and held the mug so she could smell it. She opened her eyes.

“Want some coffee?” he said.

She nodded sleepily and then sat up on the couch while keeping the blanket fully wrapped around her like a robe. After a few sips, the sleep was gone from her eyes, replaced with a sheepish expression.

“Can you please turn around?” she asked.

“Oh. Sorry.”

He heard her getting up, the blanket sliding across the floor, the bathroom door closing. He found his shirt and put it on. A few minutes later, she came out of the bathroom dressed in last night’s clothes and fresh makeup.

“It went too far last night,” she said. “We went too far.”

Her eyes were staring out the window, at a bookshelf, at the floor, anywhere but at him. He couldn’t take his eyes from her.

“We both needed an escape,” she went on. “We’d just be kidding ourselves to think it was anything more.”

Mark was confused. This was not how he imagined their morning-after conversation going. He didn’t agree with anything she was saying. His entire body was tense.

“Maybe you’re right...” he said.

“Last night never happened,” said Kathy.

“Never happened.”

Mark was starting to feel angry. He looked around for his sneakers. He found them under her desk and wanted to fling them across the room but instead began pulling them on. There was a rap at the door.

“Oh God!” whispered Kathy.

Mark quickly finished dressing and then unlocked the door. Carl was standing there. He was wearing clothes that were so wrinkled he must have slept in them. He walked in, removed some papers from a chair and sat down.

“The plume sample promised by the Navy finally arrived,” said Carl. “Alan ran some preliminaries on it. The stuff is loaded with COBIC; about half is infected and half is clean; and there’s more. A plume about the same size was just spotted in Lake Superior.”

“Where’s all this bacterium coming from?” asked Kathy. “It’s spreading too fast.”

“Maybe not spreading,” said Carl. “I think this might be part of the answer.”

He handed copies of a CDC report to both Mark and Kathy. The title page had the name of a water testing program that was still underway.

“The Ogallala aquifer is contaminated,” said Carl. “Low levels: one part per million; but what if there are plumes down there? We’d get low readings like this unless we accidentally drew directly from a plume. It’s like that parable of the blind men and the elephant.”

“What kind of aquifer is this?” asked Mark.

Kathy looked pale.

“A big one,” she said. “The Ogallala is like an underground ocean that runs from Nebraska to the Texas Panhandle. It’s all sand and gravel, a lot of water capacity; and it may be connected to other aquifers, maybe even the ones feeding out of the Great Lakes.”

“Tests of other aquifers are in the works,” said Carl. “Odds are the entire underground supply is contaminated. For all we know, it could have been that way for some time. Hell, the aquifers could be its adopted home. This infected bacterium may not be spreading. It may be everywhere already. Water purification is blocking it from the tap; but what about irrigation and livestock? The infection vector could be our food supply.”

Carl and Kathy appeared to be growing more distressed by the second. Mark’s thoughts were oddly consumed by a sense of deja vu. In his mind he could see mats of fossilized COBIC forming and imagined how this giant plume in Lake Superior might wash up on shore and collect into thick layers, which a million years later would look exactly like his fossilized mats. Everything felt like events were changing for the worse. The nanotech seed was a modern problem, but this massing behavior of COBIC was as old as time, and it only happened during extinction events. The dinosaurs met their end the last time large mats of COBIC occurred. He couldn’t explain a connection between a hundred million year old extinction and this modern nanotech monster, but he felt a link was there.

“I need to go to Lake Superior,” he said. “This massing is starting to look more and more like the beginning of something entirely new and disturbing.”

~

Mark stared out his office window at the activity below him. He needed to clear his mind. A helicopter was on its way to pick him up for the initial leg of his trip to Lake Superior. This would be the first time the roof’s helipad would be put to its intended use. When he closed his eyes, he saw Kathy’s smile and bedroom eyes and was stung by the denials of this morning. He could not work the emotions out of his system. His conflicted feelings were coloring everything. He had to try to focus on his job.

He thought about the daily briefing he’d read a few minutes ago. The briefing was very unsettling. A series of isolated and unusually small kill zones were being reported spread out across the northern part of the U. S. and Canada. Details were sketchy, but it looked like dozens had been discovered so far. Most of them had resulted in few deaths. All had occurred within the last week, with the majority hitting in the last forty-eight hours. The charts suggested events were accelerating.

This kind of small-scale horror could have been occurring at a slower pace for months and simply gone unidentified and unreported until now. The other possibility, the one which frightened him more, was that these small zones could be part of some change in pattern connected to the plumes. Someone had run a computer simulation that plotted this pattern of attacks into the future. The results indicated an escalation in fatalities. If the pattern held, these small kill zones would inflict far more death than the huge catastrophes of Los Angeles and New York combined. The simulation showed that in a matter of months, every acre of the northern hemisphere would be ravaged, one small bite at a time.

Mark picked up his overnight bag and headed up to the roof. He walked out the covered doorway and continued to the edge of the building. He leaned his hands on a railing. The wind in the trees reminded him of ocean waves. There was a distant sound of rotor blades. He squinted into the sun looking for the chopper but couldn’t see it yet. He turned around. Kathy was there with a shoulder bag.

“Thought you were staying here?” he said.

“Forget that,” she said. “You think I’m going to let you hog all the credit for this field trip?”

Mark smiled. Her eyes were clear and gazed directly back into his.

“I welcome the… umm… competition,” he said.

“Thought you would.”

A Marine helicopter landed on the roof. In minutes, they were on their way to Dobbins Air Force Base. The ride brought back memories of arriving in Los Angeles for Mark.

An Air Force tactical command and control jet was waiting on a runway. The aircraft was small, about the size of a Lear Jet but far sleeker. There was one other passenger, Lieutenant Jessica Kateland. The cabin was narrow; its walls packed with electronic monitoring equipment, radar screens, and computers. The seats were mounted on locking swivels facing the equipment consoles instead of facing forward. Mark strapped himself into a seat using a shoulder harness. In front of him was a set of computer displays containing what looked like satellite and radar images of the Great Lakes. Kathy took the seat on his left. He could not stop sneaking glances as she settled in. He was fascinated with everything she did, like the way she adjusted her clothing or toyed with her bracelet. He’d caught her smiling to herself several times today as if she were thinking something clever. Had she just started doing that or had she done it all along? He’d never looked close enough before to notice.

The jet started taxiing. Lieutenant Kateland came back from the cockpit to show them how to lock their seats facing forward. She then returned to the front of the aircraft. They lifted off fast and climbed harder than anything Mark had experienced. In the rush of engines, he felt himself browning out as the blood was drained from his upper body.

“Wow!” he said.

“Wow is right!” said Kathy. “How do I get off this ride?”

After takeoff, Kateland came back from the cockpit. She had them swivel their seats to face the equipment displays and then sat down next to Mark. He could smell her perfume. He noted there was no wedding ring. On the surface, her attitude appeared to be all business, but he couldn’t help wondering if everyone got this much personal attention. He was surprised that it made him feel uncomfortable.

“This display is showing a real-time visual of Lake Superior from a Keyhole Bird,” said Kateland. “It’s like an orbiting microscope. By changing this value, you can adjust the level of magnification.”

She typed a number. The screen zoomed in to show a small portion of the shoreline. Mark felt like he was staring over the side of a tall building. He could see boats tied up at a dock, cars and people moving around. The screen looked more like a window than a computer display.

“Why do I get the idea this thing is a version of NASA’s latest space telescope, only aimed at the Earth instead of Mars?” he said.

“I really can’t comment on that,” said Kateland. “By the time the bird moves off target, all this data will have been processed by our land systems. You can then call up different computer-enhanced displays and selectively magnify areas for closer inspection.

“By pressing this button, you can switch the display to penetrating radar. This darker area is the plume. These fuzzy lines that look like a spider’s web are surface wave clutter. The images I showed you the other day had been computer processed to remove random noise like wave clutter.”

Kateland switched the display back to the telescopic view.

“If you look closely, you can see a slow change in the angle of view on the image. As the bird’s orbit passes over the plume, its sensors have been tasked to track the plume. As it gets closer to the point of departure, where it goes out of range, you’ll see the angle changing faster and faster. See, look. Here we go.”

The image was changing, moving to a sideways view instead of straight down. There was a clearer sense of the height of objects and shadows. The screen blurred out for a moment, then was filled with an image of a forest.

“That’s it for real-time,” said Kateland. “In a minute or two, we’ll be able to uplink all the computer processed data.”

~

After a half-hour of learning how to work the equipment, Mark had the satellite display replaying an image loop of the plume. The clip was a sped up time-lapse sequence showing plume movement. The loop looked a lot like the animated clouds on a news weather map. Kateland had also shown him how to operate a ground facing video camera mounted on the belly of the jet. The camera was aimed with a joystick. Its lens was image stabilized and zoomable with a high level of magnification. The entire setup was apparently the same equipment used to aim laser guided smart-bombs at targets. For some time, he’d been watching the screen as a forward-looking view of the ground moved past at supersonic speed.

The jet was soaring across a part of the heartland that had been ravaged. Mark could almost feel the hell that must exist forty-thousand feet below. He stared down at a view of a sinuous waterway bisecting the land. Mixed in with the river and streams were all the works of man. He watched as the roads and buildings of a city went past. What would they look like after years without people to maintain them? Plants would grow between cracks in the pavement. In time, the pavement itself would be overturned, the steel would rust, the wood decay, the great cities would slowly flatten to gigantic mounds. In time, it would all be reclaimed as habitat.

He thought about the fossilized mats of COBIC. How many cycles of wide-scale extinction had happened before? They had clear evidence from millions of years ago, but could it also have happened more recently? Could ancient civilizations have reached heights equal to current times or even higher and then been wiped out by a cyclical killer? Our entire civilization had been built in the geological blink of an eye. In a few hundred years, mankind had gone from iron tools to outer space. All our great technology was fragile. If our world ended today, all signs of our technological achievements will have been wiped away by the elements in a thousand years. Near-extinction of mankind could have occurred before. Maybe that was the riddle of the Sphinx and the pyramids? Were they relics from an advanced world that was mostly lost? All we really knew of civilization was limited to a span of a few thousand years; beyond that, prehistory stretched out as the great unknown.

He looked back at the screen showing the plume’s movement sped up in time. He watched the swirls of COBIC moving through the water. He watched its center thin out and then thicken, disorganize and then reorganize. The loop was replaying endlessly. He noticed that the bacterial cloud was disrupted as it flowed over the same area of water that was a dozen miles long and a few hundred feet wide. The disruption was probably caused by an unusual current of some type. The more he stared, the more he saw a rhythm and pattern to the spiraled motion. The circular flow was leading the plume into a collision with a southern shoreline.

He slowed the replay to normal speed and zoomed in the view. Focusing on the southern shore, he could easily make out stones and even pieces of litter which had probably blown in from nearby landfills. It was eerie watching the plume of bacteria being beached and concentrated into foamy mats. He felt like he was looking through a window into the distant past; a living example of something he’d only seen fossil evidence of until now. Knowing there was something akin to a microscopic computer in some of the bacteria made what was happening even more surreal. Someone had hijacked an ancient player in mass extinctions and combined it with advanced technology. Was the creator of this monster trying to send a message or was the choice of carriers nothing but a sick coincidence? Why use a bacterium that was connected with prehistoric extinctions? What message or benefit was in that? The choice didn’t make sense. He leaned closer to the display. Maybe COBIC’s selection only made sense if this destroyer was something entirely beyond human creation. Could the seeds actually be a doomsday machine that was thousands or even millions of years old? He’d ridiculed this kind of thinking after the seed was first identified as artificial. He’d refused to even acknowledge the possibility. Why was he considering it now? COBIC had been massing like this for millions of years. The thought that this advanced nanotechnology could also be millions of years old was madness. If it were true, he would have found seeds in his fossilized beds of COBIC. The seed was a glass-hard pellet of silicon and carbon. The material would have survived… or would it? Why couldn’t the seeds have dissolved, leaving no trace behind, just like the captive lab specimens? Mark felt a cold chill and turned off the display. The thought was too wild to even consider.