Immunity Index Read online

  “Wanna bet what it is this time?” my fellow donkey asked.

  The armatures eased out the half-grown chickens, their feathers soaked in blood. I shuddered. Life offered splendor, death only repulsion.

  “You okay?” the donkey asked.

  “I feel better when they send vials of fluids.”

  “Me, too. Someday this job is going to make me puke.”

  A minimum of two people worked in the lab at any given time, but the exact staff varied by the day, as did the shift, depending on who was available and how much work there was. We were contract donkeys, all pretty much alike. Efficient. Skilled. Reasonably friendly and often enjoyably snide. Willing to take turns on the most disagreeable jobs, like handling bedraggled blood-soaked chickens. Bored out of our minds despite the urgency and terror, but we needed to earn a buck, so we were doing this until we could find something better. Although I might never find a better way to hide.

  I said, “Given all the blood and detached heads, I conclude that they died of knife wounds.”

  She laughed. Today’s fellow donkey was a middle-aged woman, a refugee from flooded New Orleans, one of the few from that disaster who had been allowed to relocate while the rest languished in ghastly camps. She was wasting enormous talents in this job—and she had just asked me the most worthwhile of questions: What was it this time? The specific answer—the specific cause—meant life or death. If a flock of fowl (or some other assemblage of livestock) fell ill, farm managers would slaughter and incinerate the animals. Or they would douse them with some kind of treatment that might be worse than the affliction but would cut their losses.

  If we had reason to believe that the answer we found could endanger more than just that flock or species, we could try to trigger a national or even worldwide emergency, for all that shamefully underfunded public health services could do. Meanwhile, we would all pray, stiff with fear, asking our various gods to keep us safe from everything being created by nature or fools with gene-splicing labs in their garages. Major havoc was being wreaked in too many places. Inevitably, and no doubt soon, it would reach us. (You might think that all this responsibility would be reflected in our paychecks. No.)

  “I’ll collect some of the blood for analysis,” I said for the record.

  She made a note. “We’ll get external material in the blood, too. Feces might add special flavor notes to the final dish.”

  “A full autopsy would be wise,” I added. That was the running joke. It was always true that we ought to be performing a more in-depth analysis, especially given our usual findings.

  “Not in the budget.” That was the cynical punch line, although obsolete. Budgets had increased lately, but it was soothing to think that closer scrutiny hadn’t become our anxious routine.

  “A safe bet,” I said, “would be avian infectious bronchitis.”

  “Yeah, a safe bet for big operations.” She hated big farming operations, although we owed our jobs and dinners to them and the flabby lumps that chickens had been overbred into.

  I gave the machine a few commands, then checked the electronic label. “These were free-range chickens. Outdoors. Maybe they got it from wild birds.”

  “I heard that chickens outnumber wild birds in Iowa.”

  “That’s the most disastrous thing I’ve ever heard. We took all of nature and overran it with chickens.”

  “I can top that disaster. The Sino cold.” After a moment, she added, “Sorry. I hope that isn’t a problem for you.”

  Yet another epidemic had befallen China, and anyone who looked Chinese might be shunned. Or murdered—apparently some misguided patriots considered homicide an effective vaccine. Unfairly, too, since that coronavirus had been traced down to a wild boar carcass revealed by thawing permafrost in Siberia, nothing Chinese about it, and China had responded fast and well. Borders had slammed shut like guillotines, the population frozen in place by quarantine, medical procedures applied with rigor and success. But everyone was jittery about epidemics, China was an enemy, and slander was a potent weapon. She knew me by my official name, Huning Li, not my artistic name, Peng, but both were unequivocally Chinese.

  And she saw my broad, elderly man’s face and heard a slight accent I tried but could never erase. With my wispy white beard, I could pass for Confucius rather than Peng, and as Peng, I had once been known as a lovely woman. Gender presentation ought not to serve as concealment, it ought instead to serve as one’s genuine identity, but a bullet in a lung can lead to desperate measures. I, founder and CEO of SongLab, designer of life and master of its language, was protected from death by that glass wall and from my creditors by bankruptcy, but little stood between me and fools.

  “We face death in many ways,” I said.

  “A new one every day.” She then entertained herself, but not me, by reciting some of the known pathogens threatening our health or food supplies. Her tasks during that shift included a sample of feces from sick pigs, and she would soon set about examining it.

  Then three soil samples arrived by certified courier and were dropped off in the airlock to our clean room. Did the soil contain the fungus that was blighting bean crops in Mexico? Urgent question. I took some cultures. Common cloned strains of beans offered no resistance to this fungus. Evil genetic engineering and the evil nature of cloned crops (not irresponsible practices by profit-hungry corporate farms) had endangered the world’s food supply, and by extension, me and the children I had once genetically designed and cloned.

  Rancor, thy name is Peng.

  (Or the fungus could have been a targeted biological attack, but at what target? The answer was beyond my means to know, but recent turmoil had made me believe in its possibility. Rancor was always epidemic.)

  As I was finishing the cultures, the cameras in the automated reception area showed a hazmat-clad courier dropping off a container marked with top-level biohazard warnings.

  That was unusual.

  “Received,” I said over the speakers. The courier waved and hurried out. The container cycled through the airlock into the clean room. I dropped what I was doing and opened it. Inside were ten vials of human blood. We were tasked to determine whether the bloods’ previous owners were infected with the Sino cold (a variety of delta-CoV, to be properly more technical—or better yet, Stone Age boar coronavirus).

  I checked the instructions again, hoping I was mistaken.

  “Who sent this?” my coworker demanded. Another very good question.

  “The label gives randomized ID. Corporate knows exactly who. We’re not supposed to know.”

  “I’ll let you handle those samples.” She noticed my eyes wrinkle from a wry smile behind my face mask. “Hey, I got kids.”

  “Retirement can’t come soon enough for me.” I began the search for viral RNA in the blood, and if I didn’t find that cold, what would I find? Presumably the patients were ill from something awful.

  By then, three hours had passed, and the chickens’ death had a cause. She looked at the report on the screen. “Avian infectious bronchitis, like you said.”

  Another gammacoronavirus, a familiar foe. “Ah, but what variety? Databases want to know.”

  I studied the output, then the raw data from the RNA bases. The program had compared strains and highlighted unexpected differences. “Oh, now this could be bad,” I said, master of the grammar of base pairs, seeing a potential death sentence in the wording. “Look right here.” A hologram screen created a three-dimensional representation of a protein. I rotated it. “Coronaviruses have a proofreading function, which is expressed here, and this variation isn’t in the databases. I don’t know how this segment would function. And I should.”

  She gave me a side-eye. Perhaps I had said too much if I wished to remain incognito. Few people shared Peng’s skill in predicting genetic changes. Or perhaps she hadn’t wished to imagine that chickens or, worse, wild birds were coughing up mutant viruses all over Iowa.

  “Then it’s a good thing those chickens are dead,
” she said. “But take a look at this for bad. Parasites in the pig shit.”

  I came to look. Her screen displayed an unmagnified sample that contained smooth, pale worms several centimeters long. They were twitching. I shuddered and looked at her other screen, which displayed a genetic breakdown of the contents.

  “Nematodes,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “I’ve seen them before.”

  “I wish I had your memory.”

  “I mean the worms, not the DNA.” But I lied.

  “What kind?”

  “The world has far too many nematodes. Perhaps Ascaris, given the size and location.”

  And so they were, as she was able to confirm: big disgusting roundworms, living in pigs no less, not quite Ascaris suum or lumbricoides or anything else, so either we had a new species (for which we wouldn’t get naming rights), or a mutation (which was becoming far too common across all species for a long list of reasons), or some careless fool had been tinkering with the language of life (also distressingly common). Both pigs and humans, and perhaps other animals, could be at risk.

  “How dangerous is this?” she asked.

  “Veterinarians could tell us.”

  After a moment, she said, “I wish they treated pig shit more responsibly on farms.”

  Whatever this worm was, its propagation was only one easy mistake or minor disaster away from our drinking water.

  “If a stable has burned down,” I murmured, remembering a quote attributed to Confucius, “do not ask about horses, ask about men.”

  She looked at me.

  “Worry about people, not animals,” I said.

  “You got that right.”

  By then the soil sample was ready. No fungus. (Yet. Sooner or later it would blow in on the wind.) We joyfully reported that.

  She looked over my shoulder at the initial results from the blood samples. Delta-CoV had been isolated from six of the ten.

  “Oh, no!” she said. “Not here!”

  “They could have come from anywhere,” I said, knowing the samples were more than likely local. “And it matters which virus.”

  “It’s delta,” she said like an accusation. Sino was a delta, and the only one of that genus that affected humans—so far as we knew.

  “We can compare it to the Sino virus,” I offered.

  She backed away, as if the virus could propagate through the screen. I worked rapt, finally able to see this monster up close. Yes, it was Sino—but no, it wasn’t. Not quite. My fingers grew cold from fear. I called up a model, then twisted and turned it and slowly grew both more and less frightened.

  “Look,” I called out to her. “The neuraminidase is different. I don’t think it would be effective.” I pointed to a section of the enzyme.

  “Effective at what?”

  “I think the virions couldn’t get out of the cell to infect someone else.”

  She gave me that side-eye again, uncertain of my competence.

  “I have two Ph.D.s,” I admitted. Actually three, but one had been merely honorary and subsequently withdrawn.

  “How did the enzyme change?”

  “Good question.” I quickly thought of an answer. “If I wanted to make a vaccine, this could be one avenue, a sort of attenuated virus.” Rumors said China had begun development, although rumors eventually asserted everything.

  Her eyes got wide. “Yeah, that would work. Shaky ethics, though.” She had a Ph.D., too. As I said, she deserved a better job than the one we had. “Who’s doing this?”

  I read her the serial number of the client. “I hope they have high ethics.” We often had doubts about our clients—and in this case, I had grave doubts. Or hopes.

  We filed our reports marked by the categories Urgent and Alert, and destroyed our samples (terror prodding us to noble thoroughness), and thus our workday ended with the discoveries of a mutant virus proofreader that might devastate Iowa fowl at any moment; unfamiliar and dangerous worms on a digestive tour of pigs; safe soil (for now); and damning evidence of tinkering with an enemy epidemic. When I stood up, I felt dizzy from fear.

  We left the lab, housed in what resembled a dreary warehouse in a part of Chicago notable for its dreary warehouses, and we went our separate ways. I enjoyed the warm evening air on my fear-chilled fingers. I wanted to go to the elevated train stop because I liked human company and got too little of it, aware more than ever that we could all die far too soon for no good reason. Sharing a train car with other passengers would bring me comfort. But as I waited for the train that evening, I heard a child’s voice.

  “Look! Is he sick?”

  I didn’t hear the response and instead decided to travel by other means and in safety, alone except for wraiths of fear and a never-vague memory of the feeling of a bullet piercing my chest. I left the platform, descended the station’s quaint old steps, and outside on the sidewalk, I raised my phone to call an autocar.

  A man wearing military fatigues approached. “Dr. Li?”

  This wasn’t going to be good, and lying wouldn’t help. “Yes,” I said.

  “Could you please come with me?”

  Fighting wouldn’t help, either. I canceled the call. “Of course.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I want you to know you aren’t in any trouble.”

  I didn’t trust his words. Confucius and I both believed in benevolence. In his long life, he had suffered exile, arrest, and attempted assassination. I was already too much like him.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Irene heard voices from downstairs as she was getting dressed before dawn. She couldn’t make out all the words, but she recognized the anger. The farm family quarreled a lot, especially Alan and Ruby, sometimes right in front of Irene.

  What was it this time? Her curiosity wrestled with her desire to respect their privacy, and curiosity won. She tiptoed to listen at the stairwell. She knew that Ruby, a stout and acid-tongued woman, did all the housework, begrudged rural life, and worried about money, since she kept the books and worked part-time at another farm or someplace. Alan did all the heavy farmwork and resented what he thought was an unfair physical burden. Their teenage son, Will, gardened, fished, and gathered food for the table—and he would slip away with his dog when the arguments got heated, too emotionally fragile for conflict. Irene suspected he’d been abused in his childhood, maybe by his parents, maybe by someone else.

  They seemed to love each other, but the stress of the farm was testing that. She suspected that each one unconsciously believed that if they ignored Nimkii long enough, the problems he posed would somehow go away.

  “It isn’t just a flag,” Alan said.

  A flag? Probably to display in support of another government policy that Irene hated.

  Ruby said something in return.

  “I need your help to put it up,” Alan continued. “That’s all I’m asking for. They’re already bought and paid for.”

  Ruby had a long response.

  “The point isn’t more visitors,” Alan said. “It’s to show where we stand. That’s not going to drive people away.”

  Will said loud and clear: “People aren’t coming because they don’t like clones.” Irene had never heard him raise his voice before.

  “Cloning’s okay for animals,” Alan said.

  Ruby said something about “too far away.”

  “Okay, we’ll do it, Will and me,” Alan said. “You can stay here and stew.” Soon the back door opened and closed.

  Irene returned to her attic room, finished dressing, brushed her hair, put on her college hat, and as a way to avoid going downstairs for a few more minutes, checked to see what her friends were saying online. More channels had gone missing. Again. But no, it’s not censorship, it’s holding people responsible for promulgating misinformation. The friends she could find were complaining about possible new travel restrictions. And her mother had created an illustrated polemic against rationing. That was so much like Mamá, but if she kept that up, p
retty soon she’d be censored, too, or arrested for standing up for old-fashioned freedom.

  How soon before the mutiny started? Because it would come soon, now just a matter of days—as far as Irene knew. Not soon enough. What could she do up in Wausau when it did? What would happen to the farm? She knew for sure what side Alan and Ruby would be on.

  She also found out what displaying the flag was about: The United States had accused China of trying to infect Americans with the Sino cold. Flying the flag would show solidarity with the Prez in his effort to keep the country safe. Safe from the cold! The debate had already turned ugly, even though no one in America or even outside of China had been infected, at least according to official reports. Was the Prez really threatening quarantines? War? Direct reprisals for dissenters? Don’t worry, online chatter assured everyone, he’ll protect us! Others asked if the virus was already really here because they knew about people who were coughing, or if it was just another common cold circulating. She had no way to know for sure anymore about much of anything.

  She got a message from Mamá to call her—why was she awake so early?

  “Hija, eso del catarro es mentira total,” she said when Irene called back. My girl, this stuff about the cold is a total lie. She always spoke Spanish with Irene.

  “¿Banderas? ¿Cómo? No nos miente el Prez nunca.” Flags? How? The Prez never ever lies to us. Irene could be snide in both languages.

  It’s one way to get rid of people. A cold. Fake colds, Mamá said.

  Irene was pretty sure the Sino cold was real, even if it ought to be called something nonracist, like maybe the delta cold. Fake colds? She believed that, too. The Prez might do anything and get away with it. She knew his attractive persona was fake. Mamá had demonstrated in an underground art piece how his face had been sculpted over time to look handsome and his body to look vigorous. Not much could be done about his mind, though. Before Irene could answer, Mamá asked:

  How far are you from the city of Wausau?

  Close. Only a few miles. Was Mamá coming to visit? Oh, no. She’d wind up in a screaming battle with Alan and Ruby for sure, and Irene would be fired, and Nimkii …