She wanted to be with him.
“Cam!?” she yelled inside the hot shell of her helmet. Her containment suit was damp with sweat. She was roasting in it. Each breath was an effort and her faceplate had fogged along one edge, creating a blind spot to her right. The lab was a neat white cube and well-lit with four bulbs, but Ruth kept turning her head, thinking she’d seen the shadow of someone who wasn’t there.
Her heart jumped each time Patrick lurched against the floor, setting off moans and shuffling from Linda, Michael, and Andrew, too, if he was still alive. Patrick had grown increasingly agitated. Ruth could only imagine the tangled mess of the living and the dead in the next room as Pat dragged himself through his friends. What if she hadn’t tied him well enough?
She set her gloves against the plastic sheeting on the wall. How thick was the cabin’s exterior? Eight inches? Ruth could nearly feel every layer of wood, brick, aluminum, and wood again, but there was a thinner and more vital barrier between herself and Cam—the plastic itself. Her lab was like a tent inside the white room, and she wondered how long the plastic sheeting would hold if Patrick or Michael burst in. Not long.
“We don’t have much time!” she shouted. “Cam!?”
“I’ll ask Greg,” he said at last.
“Get me out!”
“I’ll ask, Ruth.”
She could barely hear him, panting inside the muggy air of her helmet. Normally she would have been moving slowly, trying not to overheat, with the knowledge that she could always take the suit off if necessary. Instead, she’d run a marathon. Worse, this work space was filthy with nanotech. Her clean lab had been breached.
The plastic tent in the room consisted of two unequal compartments. The first section was secured to three of the room’s four walls, a six-by-six foot area jammed with her small desk, her laptop, the short, stumpy pylons of her microscopes, and other electronics. The second pocket was much smaller, a closet-sized airlock that stood just inside the door to the room. It served as a decon/dressing space, complete with an ordinary vacuum cleaner and storage bags for the blue hospital scrubs she typically wore in the lab. There was also a rack for her containment suit, which was almost impossible for one person to put on alone.
In her hurry to get outside wearing the suit, Ruth must have pulled open one of the seals between the decon chamber and the main tent. The lab was equipped with an emergency kit to resecure the plastic—a low-tech assortment of tape, a box knife, two rolls of plastic sheeting, extension cords, and a soldering gun—but she was uncertain what she could have done about the tear even if she’d seen it before she reentered the tent. There was little chance she could have sterilized her suit in the first place. The vacuum cleaner was only intended to remove dust, lint, and hair from her clothing before she went inside.
They’d installed other emergency measures: a makeshift air exchange system, and powerful UV lamps that should at least hinder an out-of-control nano if not burn it completely. Ruth believed she could reseal the lab from within, then decontaminate it and her suit, but then what? Making a break for the front door wouldn’t do her any good. Without the suit, she wouldn’t get two steps into the next room, and, wearing it, she would only contaminate herself again with no way left to remove the protective skin before she ran out of air. She needed help. She couldn’t cut through the exterior wall herself ...
What if they said no?
Her sense of déjà vu took her back to the International Space Station. The Leadville government had refused to bring her back to Earth because she was an asset they couldn’t replace once she was gone, no matter that she swore there was nothing else she could do in orbit. Now she faced the same dilemma. The terrified people in Jefferson might insist on keeping her in her lab, which was why she’d asked Cam to come alone. Not so long ago, the two of them had been very close, although she could only guess how his grief had changed him.
He sounded as if he’d been about to suggest she had to stay if only to take care of the infected people. No one else could approach them.
But I can give someone else my suit if I’m outside, she
thought.
Maybe a better person would have volunteered to tend to their friends. Unfortunately, in her own way Ruth had become as damaged as any survivor, not only because of the bloodshed she’d witnessed but also because of her long months spent in solitude, second-guessing everything she’d done.
Her equipment was not as bad as she’d told Cam. None of the things she’d said were lies, just exaggerations to make her point. The atomic force microscope was an IBM Centipede exactly like the one she’d used in Grand Lake. Instead of the traditional, single probe, it had a tip array of a hundred points working in parallel. Once she’d secured a plague nano to her test surface, Ruth had been able to map its general exterior in less than seventeen minutes, after which she’d begun to probe deeper into the machine, which was covered with wrinkles and furrows, ironically, much like the human brain.
There was no question that she could do better in a real lab with assistants and more computing power—but she could have stayed. She was afraid to remain here alone. She was too full of bad energy, which only compounded her guilt.
These people had put their faith in her. They’d worked so hard, from constructing this lab to selling corn futures to buy the small Ingersoll Rand air compressor they’d modified to recharge her suit’s tanks after those rare times she wore it instead of her hospital scrubs. They’d even hauled a washer/ dryer unit to the village and installed it in their shower building solely for the use of her scrubs. Everyone else did their laundry in the creek, even the new mothers. All of their precautions, every ounce of determination and grit ... Would it be enough?
What if she was the weak link?
That’s not true,
she thought, arguing with herself. It’s not!
If nothing else, we need to get moving before more sick people stumble into town. They want to believe it can’t happen, but it will.
Ruth picked up the walkie-talkie. She’d turned it down to hear Cam through the wall, because it was still rattling with other voices. She interrupted them, upping its volume as she hit the SEND button. “This is Goldman.” She hadn’t planned to speak formally, but the old habit came back easily and she used it like a weapon, covering her remorse with a tone full of steel. “I’m coming out.”
“Wait!” Greg said. “Ruth, wait.”
“I want to dictate my findings so far.”
“What is she talking about?” one woman asked, as another female voice said, “Let me find some paper! Ruth? This is Bobbi. Let me find some paper first.”
“You have to stay inside,” Greg said. “No one else can do this for you.”
“He’s right,” Cam said.
“I’m coming out!” Ruth said, but this time she heard less conviction in her own voice. Most of her attention was still on the words she couldn’t say to Cam.
I’m sorry,
she thought.
I miss Allison, too.
In the next room, Patrick convulsed again, rustling and banging. Ruth wondered if he was dying. Was she honor-bound to go see? What if she could stop him from choking or if he was bleeding again? “I’ve already done most of what I can with this equipment,” she said. “Please believe me. If there was more—”
A different man cut in. “What about Linda and Michael?”
“Someone else can have my suit if they want to go back inside. You should fill the air tanks again, and meanwhile—”
“Ruth, that’s a huge waste of time,” Greg said.
“Meanwhile, I can run more analysis on my laptop! That’s exactly what you want me to do, and it’s not safe in here!”
The other man protested. “Linda would never—”
“I’ll bring my computer and the AFM, but you need to get me out.”
It was Cam who spoke against her next. “You said the lab’s contaminated,” he said, warning the others.
Oh, Cam,
she thought.
I need to be able to count on you.
“What does that mean?” someone asked, and Greg said, “Ruth, the nanotech’s loose in there, too?”
“You’re going to need awhile to get some tools together anyway. I’ll sterilize things in here, and while I’m doing that I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.”
“There’s no way to know if you’re clean,” Cam said.
“There is.”
“Ruth, can’t it wait?” Bobbi asked. “Pay attention to what you’re doing. Tell us what you can after you’re outside.”
“No, I’ll tell you now,” she said, struggling again with her claustrophobia, but it filled her voice with emotion. “I’m going to take off my suit before you open the wall,” she said, “so there’s a good chance I won’t make it out of here without being infected myself.”
Ruth knew who’d built
the mind plague. She recognized the work, even though most of it was based on the same breakthroughs of the machine plague and every other nanotech that followed. The first plague had been a gateway. Once opened, it pointed the way for everything else.
Of course, its design team hadn’t meant it as a plague at all. The people behind the
archos
tech, a duo named Kendra Freedman and Al Sawyer, intended their device to be a cancer cure—and they’d succeeded in two of the three major challenges to nano-scale machines. For an energy source, the
archos
tech used the body heat of its host. To create enough nanos to accomplish any significant chore, it contained a wildly efficient replication key, allowing a single nano to become two, which became four, which became sixteen—in seconds.
The vaccine was only the same technology refined. It was no more intelligent than its brother. That was why the early models were imperfect. The vaccine had only the slightest capacity to discriminate between the plague and other molecular structures. That changed when the science teams in Leadville improved the vaccine’s ability to think. It was a real chore to bestow the faculties of awareness and decision upon machines this size without crimping their operational speed, but as soon as the vaccine was able to outpace its rival, U.S. forces gained a small advantage over the Russians and Chinese.
Unfortunately, the nanotech was too ethereal for the U.S. to keep to themselves. The final version of the vaccine spread as inexorably as the machine plague itself. Whenever a soldier loaded his weapon, each time ground crews rearmed a jet, their breath, sweat, and blood were thick with microscopic machines—and so another benefit was carried to the enemy, too.
Days before the bombing, Leadville also developed a nanotech called the booster. Again, its core was based on what they already knew. The booster used the same heat engine, and it made more of itself only by disassembling the machine plague, but this nano had the true beginnings of intelligence. The discrimination key that served the vaccine so well was at last becoming something more profound.
The booster was intended to read its host’s DNA and to reinforce that information. Ultimately, it would even correct and maintain those codes. A man who received a perfect booster in his twenties would
always
be in his twenties, immune to viruses and infections and protected from the slow deterioration caused by age, poor diet, or genetic miscues like diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. The first model of the booster was light-years short of this magic, but it had given Ruth, Cam, and many others some protection from radiation poisoning on the outskirts of the Leadville crater.
Again, the nanotech had spread. The booster was now worldwide exactly like the vaccine, available for everyone to use and study. Ruth knew there was also a fourth fully functional nano, because it was hers.
The parasite had no benign features whatsoever. It was a violently simplified model of the booster combined with a new discrimination key, a rough, bare bones machine
designed to attack the vaccine instead of the machine plague.
This was the doomsday weapon she’d created in Grand Lake. It would have left everyone vulnerable to the machine plague again, laying waste to the armies on all sides as they scrambled for elevation.
Ruth couldn’t say what avenues were being pursued by other allied researchers. As for herself, she just didn’t have the stomach for more killing. She’d set aside her own efforts at weaponized nanotech to develop new spin-offs of the booster, pursuing medical technology that would not only prevent disease—it should also heal wounds such as Cam’s old, body-wide injuries. There were hundreds of thousands of people with plague scarring, and thousands more still struggling with radiation sickness or burns. Ruth wanted to help. Now that decision seemed like a criminal error. The other side had pulled far ahead when she might have been the one to destroy them first.
“The nanotech is Chinese,”
Ruth said, calling to the walkie-talkie. She’d set it on the desktop to free her hands as she worked a UV lamp over her equipment. “The style is too similar to everything else of theirs I’ve seen. That wasn’t much, but Leadville was studying enemy programs as closely as possible.”
“You’re sure, Ruth?” Greg said.
“Yes. The nanotech is Chinese.” She tried to irradiate every nook and seam, which was especially difficult among her paperwork, her laptop, the two microscopes, picoamme ter, and power cords. She had to ruffle through her gear with one hand as she held the lamp with the other.
The light seared her eyes even though she kept her face half turned, using her helmet as a shield. The purple-white heat felt like a small sun. It was no accident that she targeted her gear and the desk first, because the lamp might compromise the material of her suit. In fact, it could melt through the plastic sheeting if she wasn’t careful.
