Immunity Index Page 17

  The city’s Health Department called again. “We need more cars to make deliveries.”

  “Consider it done.”

  With a little effort, she got it done. As she worked, her mood soured. Was it anger? Anger was good. Familiar. Energizing. Maybe even healthy. But angry at precisely who? She began to list targets, and the list quickly became long.

  The two employees reported for work, and she gave them a fast briefing. “Our chief task is to help keep people alive in any way we can. That means safe, efficient transportation.”

  “I believe God wants me to do this,” one of them said, a woman named Summer Ngan. “I’ll be praying for everyone and bless each car.”

  Her coworker gave her a glance but said nothing. Both were very capable. Besides, a blessing for each car might do good. Who knew?

  She thanked Summer but wondered if some problems were too big for God to solve—certainly not a god at her small level of omnipotence, for all that she was enjoying her powers. She took the time to check the local mutiny chatter and tell them what she’d done, and she learned that a national mutiny news feed existed. The mutineers must have planned all along to create one. Well, as Summer would say, bless them. Maybe they were more capable than she’d thought.

  She put the mutiny news feed on audio. Emergencies were being declared in a lot of places—but not nationally. No one had a death count or prediction or any other hard numbers. Most authorities agreed the killer was the delta cold, but there seemed to be two kinds of it, or at least two very different reactions to it.

  The feed reported with scorn that the White House had issued a statement deploring the looting of pharmacies and threatening action to end social unrest, but it hadn’t said where that was happening. Maybe it wasn’t happening at all.

  No one was saying what was going on at the refugee camps—probably something even worse than what was happening in Milwaukee. If she could help keep Milwaukee more or less intact, maybe the city could eventually help the camps somehow. A successful mutiny needed a city with all possible resources available.

  Callers kept requesting cars. She automated the responses despite a clumsy setup process. It would rain soon. Would showers clean the air or give the virus moisture to survive longer? That was still in debate.

  The city was sending cleaning fluid, gloves, and masks to public sites for distribution, and it needed more cars. The city’s Health Department had also learned of a possible treatment, an antiviral medicine delivered by eye drops, of all things, and would organize distribution of it. Two of the local AutoKar offices needed more staffing. That problem took a while to solve. She tried to sweet-talk one employee by stressing all the lives he could save. He asked if this was part of the mutiny.

  “The city is in a state of emergency.” She hoped that was what he wanted to hear.

  “They’re talking about it on the Prez’s channel. Traitors, they say. I want to be a traitor.”

  Perfect! “We’re under the control of Emergency Government even though corporate said we shouldn’t do that. The city government is in mutiny. Mutineers supporters wear purple. This is a mutiny operation now.”

  “Then I’m in. Hey, can I wear purple jewelry today?” Corporate rules banned flashy jewelry.

  “Wear all you have and wear it proud.”

  Emergency Government asked her to attend an all-personnel video briefing. I’m part of the city’s personnel now? The mayor, in need of a shave, dressed in a purple Hawaiian shirt, appeared on her screen:

  “I want to thank you all and make one thing clear. This is a mutiny. This isn’t a declaration of independence. We’re still proud citizens of the United States.” He spoke as if he were delivering a thundering sermon, like the preacher he used to be. “We have pledged to respond to this dire emergency with all our abilities and powers. If we get adequate national leadership, we will follow it. If not, we will forge our own course with anyone who shares our commitment. We have by our actions pledged our loyalty to our fellow citizens. Thank you for your work. You are saving lives.”

  Berenike thought for a moment. She hadn’t voted for that guy, but maybe he was okay. It really was a declaration of independence, a contingent one. She checked the activists’ network, and it was abuzz with demands for an outright declaration.

  She didn’t have time for that debate. Don’t they have real work to do? I could give them a lot. Anyway, someone seemed to be trying to hijack a bus. Big mistake. God would punish sinners.

  * * *

  With access to the news, I soon learned that a far bigger mutiny than I’d hoped for was under way, as well as a backlash against the mutiny, in addition to an epidemic—all this must have been the earthquake I’d felt gathering two days earlier.

  Despite the many urgencies, we could address only the epidemic, and that might be enough. A few of us met, face-to-face (finally), in Colonel Wilkinson’s office, a room graced with a family photo of a woman and a teenager in the corner of a bare shelf and no other personal possessions or decoration, as if he did not wish to claim ownership of the space or seek any comfort in his duties there.

  “Do we know where the attenuated virus came from? The one that was released as a vaccine.” I asked. “It’s not ours.”

  “That’s for the historians to worry about,” Node 6 said. “We have a job to do.”

  “Yes,” Vita said. “How will these viruses interact?”

  To my surprise and concern, Node 6 wasn’t military. (To no surprise, Node 1 was military—in fact a tag team of individuals.) Instead, Node 6 came from a corporate background, the exact kind of person to whom I had always imagined I was sending reports when I worked at the private laboratory, warning of discoveries that made me quake with fear: an impatient, profit-oriented executive who focused on financial reports, not laboratory reports. Tavis was his name—whether his first or last wasn’t made known to me (clearly not an artistic name), and neither was his exact corporate provenance. His sun-bleached blond hair, ruddy skin with a hint of freckles, and rugged build whispered of wealth because no one of modest means could spend that much time outdoors getting exercise.

  I noticed that my question had been sidestepped. “I asked who made the virus, the one that was released, out of admiration.”

  “Isn’t it just like the one that you and Dr. Peixoto designed?” Tavis said. He looked at her as if she understood a subtext. She showed no reaction, not even annoyance. Perhaps she knew too much, including why he wanted to avoid the answer. I hoped my observation was wrong, but my heart was plummeting.

  “It’s almost like the one we designed,” I said. She had provided a lot of ideas for it. Had she known what was about to be released? Suddenly something made sense: If the Prez’s plan failed, someone would have to take the blame, and the guilt could be heaped on Peng, who was already an ignominious DNA tinkerer. (Was that paranoia? Again, I hoped so, but my heart continued to plummet.)

  “So the attenuated virus that was released is even better,” Tavis said defensively.

  “It’s meant to confer immunity,” I said, not answering his assertion. Retaliation felt sweet. “How quickly would immunity take effect?”

  “Are you suggesting that…” began Node 4, a quick-witted woman named Professor Wicker. Her frown finished the sentence. Many vaccines took days, even weeks to produce antibodies. I’d already calculated that this viral vaccine, with its efficient design, would work immediately, but I wanted people to worry. No one besides myself had been sufficiently terrified throughout this entire process.

  For a long moment, no one spoke.

  “This will be an easy question to answer,” I said, “by examining people who’ve been infected. I think it should be the first question for deciding how the two viruses are interacting out in the wild.”

  “We really need to know what’s happening,” Vita said.

  I had other, more important questions, and the data would answer them, so I agreed wholeheartedly. The question of how they interacted mattered most
immediately to our task of saving lives. Although I felt certain the attenuated virus, meant to be a vaccine, was working, I could be very wrong. We split up assignments and returned to our workstations, and I propped my door open with a wastebasket, a statement about my availability as much as about my need to be part of a real-life greater whole after too much solitary confinement.

  Thus we began to examine data from live and dead human beings like Roman augurs scrutinizing the entrails of animals sacrificed to the gods: lung, nasal cavity, throat, sputum, and even a little blood—but unlike the Romans, we couldn’t keep sacrificing offerings until one gave us the answer we sought. Dum spiro, spero, the Romans had punned. While I breathe I hope. We needed to do our part to keep people breathing, and suddenly I thought of a fast, obvious shortcut to the complex research.

  * * *

  Avril struggled against the too-tight clamp on her arm as the centaur dragged her from the lake. She fought to regain her footing, but it pulled her too fast, and her legs banged into trees and rocks at the lakeshore. And through it all, she screamed.

  “You killed Drew! I know there’s a human controlling this. Listen to me. People are dying, and you’re killing them. How can you do this?”

  She suspected no one was actually listening. A centaur could be as autonomous as a car, just with better software and even better legal protections. If an autonomous police robot hurt or killed someone, by law no one was responsible. The murder wouldn’t matter.

  She screamed and fought and cursed anyway. Drew mattered to her.

  The robot dragged her uphill toward Dejope, and her fight turned to panic. “Let me go! You have no right!”

  Students were fleeing all around, and the centaur wasn’t stopping them. Why me?

  No, they weren’t all fleeing. A couple of dozen ran toward her—toward the centaur, and she glimpsed purple in their clothes. They carried clubs, maybe other weapons, brave but stupid. The centaur’s control module spun in their direction. She put her free hand to her ear to be ready for the sonic blast. Instead she heard a tiny noise, and one of the students flew as if he had been jerked from behind. A bullet?

  A centaur can do anything, and it won’t matter.

  The robot didn’t slow down, dragging her straight toward the building.

  A door opened, and the robot threw her inside. She tried to shield her face with an arm as she hit the floor and slid. She was climbing to her feet before she stopped. The door had shut behind her. She ran to it, tugged on the handle, and beat her fists on the glass. Locked in again.

  Her left shoulder felt wrenched, and her right elbow and thigh ached with bruises. Her wet clothes had mud and grass stains. Her phone was still on her wrist, though, and it still worked.

  She could break out again. She ran to the office and grabbed the dumbbell. This time she’d throw it right through an outside window. No more sneaking around. No more being discreet.

  “Don’t try it,” her phone said.

  A drone buzzed on the other side of the window.

  “Who are you?” she said. That voice had to be a human being, even if it was filtered to sound metallic.

  “Stay in Dejope or die,” it said.

  Did she recognize that voice? Maybe. It didn’t matter. She was going to die of the cold regardless.

  “Go upstairs and help your sick friends.”

  “Who are you?”

  “They need your help. Everyone’s left and they’re alone.” The voice gloated. Machines didn’t gloat, at least not very well.

  “Let us out so they can get real care.”

  No answer. And her phone didn’t work for anything else. Well, she might as well survive for as long as she could, and maybe she’d spot another opportunity for freedom. She set down the dumbbell and took the stairs to the second floor. She passed no one on the way. Although most people had escaped, voices were murmuring in the lounge. She walked in, wet and bedraggled.

  Hetta turned and looked shocked. “You’re back?”

  “A centaur hauled me back. I guess I’m important.”

  She wrung her gloved hands. “Is help coming?” The expression on her face and in her voice begged for the answer to be yes.

  “I don’t know. I was talking to someone, and I asked for that, and”—she shook her head—“well, I don’t think so.”

  “They’re really sick.” Hetta took a deep breath. “Drew was going to get help.”

  Avril tried to come up with something to say that wouldn’t sound like blood splashing into lake water. “They stopped him.”

  “Stopped?”

  Avril felt too sorrowful to say anything more precise. She looked down and shook her head again. “I’m sorry.”

  They stood silently, and in the silence Avril imagined the gloating in the voice on her phone again. If somehow she survived, she would get a different phone and smash the one she had into bits with a hammer. In the meantime, she had one way to fight back. “Can I help?” she said.

  “Yeah.” Hetta sounded defeated. “We put them in separate rooms to protect them from secondary infections. Drew … recommended that.” Her voice choked at his name. She gave Avril some instructions, a mask, and some gloves. “Make sure they’re comfortable, mostly. We can’t do much more. Do you want to check on Shinta first?”

  Avril found her awake in her bunk, and staring through half-open eyes at the ceiling. Her lips had no traces of blood, but they looked bluish.

  “Hey, Shinta. I’m back. Need anything?”

  She looked, blinking. “Oh. Hey, Avril. I’m okay.”

  “Want something? Water, food?”

  “Tea? Can I get tea?” she asked like a little girl hoping for a favor—Shinta, the mighty athlete. It hurt to hear.

  “Anything you want.”

  In the kitchenette, she stared at the phone strapped to her wrist as she worked. That was how they had tracked her and found her, and it proved that she was more valuable than Drew, but she couldn’t imagine why. With every breath, as she boiled water in a microwave and found a tea bag and a cup, her anger grew. Since she was going to die anyway, she felt less afraid, maybe like a soldier on a suicide mission—or rather, the fear didn’t matter anymore. It was only doubt, and now she had a certain future. When her phone started mocking her again, she was going to have a lot to say.

  She served Shinta the tea, ready to talk with her about her family, about the weather, about anything but the situation, to make her feel cared for.

  Shinta pointed. “There’s a camera,” she said, her voice hoarse. A crawling camera clung to the ceiling next to the light fixture, white like the ceiling, barely noticeable. Some sadist was watching on the other side. Maybe they enjoyed seeing students suffer and die. That didn’t surprise Avril.

  “I’ll take care of it.” She got a winter glove from the closet to protect her hand because those cameras sometimes fought back with shocks or needles on their legs. She hurried to shove over a desk, climbed on it, and, with a fast swing of her arm, grabbed the camera.

  Even through the glove, it felt like holding a tiny squirming porcupine. She threw it on the desktop and stamped. The crunch felt like victory.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” her phone said.

  She jumped down to the floor. “Why? Do you enjoy watching sick people die?” She left the room so she could talk without disturbing Shinta, and lowered her mask so she could speak loud and clear. “Does that make you feel high and mighty?” No answer. “I know it does. I know what you are, even if I don’t know who you are. I know you like it because you’re keeping those students trapped so that they suffer and die. This is why you and people like you aren’t fit to run this country or any country. You’re sadists.”

  She heard laughter on the other end.

  She strode down the hall, searching for another crawl-cam to relish crushing. “You’ve been torturing people for a long time, and you’re going to pay. It’s not enough to reduce people to poverty, you have to turn them into nonhumans, things
that don’t matter so you can do anything to them.” Nothing she could say would change any minds, and she knew that, but everything she said made her feel more powerful. No more appeasing. She could rant for a long time.

  A new voice interrupted, this one unfiltered and female.

  “We have someone for you to talk to.”

  “Someone who will let us go?”

  “Someone who can make a difference. Hold on. I’ll turn your camera on. He’ll want to see you.”

  Maybe all that ranting had achieved something. “Who are you?”

  “Chancellor Bowley.” Her voice was silky with self-satisfaction.

  Avril gritted her teeth. The chancellor had been foisted on the campus to destroy it. “You’re a murderer.”

  “But you don’t have to die. Look at this.”

  Her father’s face came on her little screen. He looked furious.

  “I have a deal to make,” Bowley said. “Avril, tell your father what’s happening.”

  She took a moment to organize her thoughts, and a new one popped into her mind. This is why they want me: as a pawn to use against Dad. And he’s in the mutiny.

  “She’s killing people. We’re trapped here in the dorm, we can’t get out, and that cold is here. People who leave, who fight back, get shot. I don’t know what else she’s done, but she’s a murderer.”

  His eyes got narrower, his lips tighter. He understood.

  “We’ll let her go,” Bowley said, “provided you do some things for us.”

  “What would that be?” His tone was flat with anger.

  “You can stop what you’re doing. Walk out. Cooperate.”

  If they were threatening him, Avril realized, that meant they couldn’t get to him in any other way. He was safe, physically, and he was a danger to them.