The SONG of SHIVA (5 page)

Lyköan dropped his
Ōkii
tablet on the kitchen table and opened the refrigerator. There was some leftover
tawt manpla
, fried fish and rice cakes, sealed in its original plastic container. Only two days old, much of it was still uneaten. The old girl might enjoy that.

Removing a paper plate from the overhead cupboard, he dumped the solidified mass onto it and stuffed everything in the microwave, setting the timer for two minutes. As the meal was heating, he quickly washed the container in the sink, leaving just enough time for a bathroom break. By the time he returned, dinner was ready. Removing the steaming heap, he carried it back down the stairs and outside.

Placing the food on the ground in front of his appreciative karma-mate, his earlier emptiness returned.
She needs a name
, he thought. He had put it off for weeks. As had always been the case before, nothing immediately came to mind. If only he were more naturally creative. He still thought the perfectly descriptive moniker might present itself on its own. Every creature deserved a name. From somewhere in his reading he recalled a concept that until receiving an individual name, a man did not possess a soul. Could something similar be said of the beasts?

The troubling nervous energy had returned. He had already run fifteen klicks before six that morning, in sixty-three minutes and a few odd seconds. His times were improving. But this restlessness demanded something different. The entire night was free. Rather than returning to the apartment, he started up Soi Sitthiprasat on foot, the perfect destination already in mind.

CHAPTER SIX

There is no place in Nature for extinction.

                            Lucretius
:
On the Nature of Things

A riot of mauve and turquoise, the WHO front offices occupied the entire twelfth floor of the thirty-story Sathon Tai Tower, less than a block from the French embassy, in the very heart of downtown Bangkok. Hurriedly pushing through twin glass doors, Nora marched across the lobby to the reception desk. Couched inside a cozy cocoon of pink-veined marble, she found a young woman, the perfect centerpiece for this sea of lilac and alabaster, surrounded by phone banks and color-coordinated shelving units stacked high with office technology and half a dozen breathtakingly fragrant cut flower arrangements.

“Good morning. I phoned earlier. Doctor Carmichael. I’m here to see Doctor Tardieu?”

“Oh yes. Doctor Tardieu is very happy to see you. Please, let me reach him.” While the syntax was slightly off, the receptionist wasn’t wasting any time. At least no mention had been made of her late arrival. Nora was willing to wait. She had rushed through breakfast and a short galvanic photon adjustment – for the jet-lag, then had made a quick call home to talk with her sister, Diane, and hear the girls’ voices, all of which had set her schedule off by twenty minutes. But the call had been necessary. She was now satisfied that Dana and Emily couldn’t be in better hands. One less thing to worry about. Still, much of the nagging grief remained, dark energy that she hoped to redirect, transmute into something more useful and bearable.

“Doctor Tardieu say I am to escort you to the laboratory where he reviews data with the staff. Please, go this way.” This girl was better than most. At least she’d learned to insert definite articles before nouns. Most Thais omitted them entirely.

Retaining the almost invisible communications headset, the receptionist rose from her chair, an ethereal picture of grace and motion, elegantly arrayed in a plain, abbreviated white
phanung
and astonishingly elevated, white high-heels. Stepping down from her station, she floated out of the reception area. Nora ran to catch up.

Jesus. What a figur
e!
Onyx hair glistened under fluorescent lights, swaying to the lithe rhythm of a perfectly-proportioned striding biped.
Must be a perfect size zero
.
Some girls have all the luck
.

They followed a corridor that extended along a wall fashioned from a single sheet of clear plexi. Through a pressurized doorway, the receptionist directed Nora into a well-appointed conference room where four men and two women, dressed in white lab coats, were gathered in front of a large wall-mounted monitor.

A short, balding man, in his early fifties Nora guessed, waved them over. After opening the door and motioning Nora inside, the receptionist closed the door with a metallic click and vanished. Screwing on an earnest smile, Nora approached, awkwardly extending her hand.

“Good morning, Dr. Tardieu. Nora Carmichael.”
Christ
!
Stanley meets Livingstone
.
Great first impression
.
The words had spilled out without warmth or inflection. “I appreciate being invited to visit this morning.” And it wasn’t improving.

“Dr. Carmichael! So nice to meet you.” Tardieu was being absolutely effusive, his broad grin surrounding a barely perceptible French accent. Two decades at Princeton as a department chair, yet he seemed genuinely pleased to see her. “We were just getting started ― Doctor ― our usual morning staff meeting. You haven’t missed a thing.”

Other members of the investigative team were introduced. Initially a blur, it was a representative sampling of talent from around the world. While the WHO was technically a subordinate arm of the UN, it operated with considerable autonomy, enough for the freedom necessary to carry out its mission, certainly with less political interference than its far more bureaucratic parent. The organization also had a reputation for hiring only the most dedicated and eminently qualified professionals. In the global scientific community there was still significant cachet attached to a WHO staff appointment.

In deference to this perception, when Tardieu spoke, Nora listened. The other seven scientists gathered here this morning did likewise. On the screen the group was viewing, the only-recently-identified TAI virus was displayed in flawlessly crisp, color-coded scientific resolution, floating like a celestial body in inky darkness. At Tardieu’s direction, a seated graphics tech manipulated the model, rotating the orb as though the group was observing a planet from space.

“Right here, Dr. Carmichael,” Tardieu said, highlighting a short protuberance of odd-looking molecules, “one of the antigen markers we identified only yesterday. As you can see, with a few notable exceptions, Thai Avian Incubating virus bears a striking resemblance to the common Type-A human influenzas.”

“If it’s not a breach of lab protocol, Dr. Tardieu, please, call me Nora.”

“Of course, Nora. At the university, I was known as ‘Old JG’. If we’re abandoning form, you may do the same. Acceptable?”

“Sure, JG,” Nora agreed, politely dropping the modifier. She had expected, under the direction of a scientist with Tardieu’s impressive credentials, a far more straight-laced lab environment. But that pleasant revelation was nothing when compared to the amazing image floating before her eyes on the display screen.

“I can almost guess what you’re thinking,” Tardieu said. “You’re wondering about our molecular modeling apparatus. Our little secret, although I’m afraid the WHO can’t take any credit for it.”

“You can’t? What do you mean?” Nora asked.

“We identified and isolated the virus, rendered it noninfectious with gamma irradiation ― that’s credit we can honestly claim ― but this model, what you see here, complete in every detail, is the result of groundbreaking work that a private company generously loaned us to aid in our efforts with the current crisis. I’m sure you’ve heard the company’s name before: Innovac Pharma?”

“I’m not surprised,” Nora acknowledged. “What significant medical breakthrough in the last decade doesn’t owe something to IVP? But this, honestly, this is amazing. How long has the WHO been hiding it?”

“You’re right, it
is
quite astounding. I agree.” Tardieu’s honest respect was obvious. “Innovac shipped the hardware immediately after TAI first presented. Other than our system here ― and one other even more advanced array in the UK ― the technology exists nowhere else on earth. Most of the scientific community isn’t even aware it exists.”

“The CDC isn’t, I can tell you that.”

Tardieu had the basketball-sized virus brought center screen, then rotated it slowly on its axis. Locked into a sequence of magnifying rectangles, a virtual camera approached the model’s irregular surface.

Nora was absolutely astounded. This sure explained plenty, particularly how WHO investigators had identified and isolated certain features of the virus so quickly. Rumors of their success had been circulating for weeks. Their first advantage, of course, had been arriving on the scene within days of the primary infection, allowing the WHO to observe the virus
in situ
. By the time the first sample had reached the CDC Atlanta labs, the epidemic had been raging for weeks. But by then, Tardieu and his team had already shifted their research to this utterly harmless computer-generated depiction, not the actual pathogen itself. The benefits were many, but the most obvious was the absolute safety the transition now guaranteed. No risk of accidental exposure. No possibility of a senseless infection. No Jack Cummings lying on a slab in the Emory Hospital morgue.

“Have you been able to identify any individual pairings on the genetic strand?” she asked, pulling herself out the self-recriminating spiral.

Tardieu broadened his grin. “Every last one of them. And we’re able to study each in perfect clarity at any desired magnification – by means of the same technology, something the Innovac people call Indirect Fractal Resolution.”

“Even beneath the protein surface?”

“Absolutely anywhere in the microorganism. Anywhere at all. But discovering their function and all the allied segments, well, that still requires old-fashioned investigative legwork ― basic experimental trial and error.”

“It’s still incredible.”

“I agree. But, there are limitations. Even short strands can contain thousands of pairings. And not every... surface antigen marker, let’s say... is as obvious as this one.” Tardieu whirled the lightpen’s glowing ember rapidly around a molecular appendage protruding menacingly from the model’s surface as the sphere continued to pitch and yaw onscreen.

At Tardieu’s direction, the virtual camera climbed away from the protein surface and disappeared into the plasma’s nether darkness. Reaching a predetermined apogee, it then dove back towards the viral sphere’s opposite surface at dizzying speed, revealing another hemisphere, of similar complexity and breathtaking beauty.

“This particular GATTCCTA-ending structure, for instance,” Tardieu explained, circling a surface artifact with his lightpen, “located at the equator here… it’s probably the most obvious of the eighteen hemagglutinin markers we’ve identified so far. To develop a reasonably effective vaccine though, we’ll need to identify nearly every protein trigger well before the next outbreak. We still don’t know how many markers――”

“The
next
outbreak?” Nora interrupted. “Are you certain there will be one?”

“Quite certain.”

“How can you be?”

“Another of Innovac’s new analytical tools almost assures it ― quite convincingly,” Tardieu answered. 

“And the virus will re-emerge with the same antigenic structure?”

“Not exactly the same,” Tardieu admitted. “But we’ve run algorithms of the previous outbreak’s mutational demographics and identified the most likely variants that any subsequent generational progression is likely to display.”

“You’re joking. How?” Nora asked. Each revelation seemed more incredible than the last.

“Hypothecated Modeling is what the Innovac people call it. Our own testing of the process they’ve developed has shown it to be almost one hundred percent reliably predictive ― at least in our experimental tests. As I said, it’s really quite astounding. And these predictive capabilities are irreproachable.”

All of this accomplished while the CDC had unnecessarily risked lives. Nora couldn’t shake the guilt. 

“As I mentioned,” Tardieu went on, “so far we’ve identified eighteen separate hemagglutinin markers, all of them capable of penetrating the human cellular wall. Of course, once inside, the virus employs an infected cell’s own mitochondria for repeated replication, until destroyed by an immunologic response ― or the host dies.”

Nora let the innocent condescension pass. What he was explaining was very old science, how viruses turned infected cells into replication engines; that they were really nothing more than snippets of genetic code balled up inside a thin protein coat, not even living organisms, just basic programming devices.  

“We simply don’t know how many more are still hiding from us,” Tardieu was saying. “There’s no way to determine the exact number without resorting to hardscrabble detective work. And that’s what we’re doing right now, ten hours a day, six days a week. It may take another two months to identify them all, unless we get really lucky.

“We’ve also made progress with our analysis of survivor serum antigen levels ― which suggest that at the peak of the epidemic, the virus was mutating dozens of times a day.”

It was well known that many RNA viruses mutated as often as once a replication, which explained their extreme pathogenicity. The CDC had devoted weeks to its live virus work and never discovered anything like this.

“And you’re certain this analysis is a hundred percent certain?” Nora asked.  

“Nearly,” Tardieu hedged. “But don’t misunderstand: HM isn’t a possibility engine ― based solely on chance. It relies on pure mathematics. All biological processes, including viral mutation, obey strict laws of biochemistry that mathematically determine their outcomes. Hypothecated Modeling begins by identifying the mechanically analyzed avian and human host metrics and then integrates them with the virus’s own genetics. All potential interactive outcomes are then compared algorithmically with the original host metrics again to determine the efficacy and impact on the host’s cellular dynamics in every possible mutational variation. Performing this calculation repeatedly with each succeeding outcome results in a continuously expanding cascade of all theoretically possible mutations.

“All these potentialities are then filtered through the prism of the Innovac HM algorithm to arrive at the actual route the pathogen must take over the course of its entire mutating evolutionary future to survive.

“It’s even more complex than my feeble attempt at explanation. To be perfectly honest, I don’t entirely understand every nuance myself. In all the world maybe only one person does: Atma Pandavas.”

Nora had listened politely, and though she respected Tardieu, she wasn’t entirely convinced that what he was suggesting was even theoretically possible.

“But how does anybody go about identifying every potential parameter? Isn’t that a little like counting every grain of sand on the beach?”