Immunity Index Read online

  “At the time, it wasn’t illegal.” He paused to sneeze. “Sort of a gray area. That changed, and … I come under a lot of scrutiny for my job.”

  Avril wasn’t going to cry, wasn’t going to rage. Wasn’t going to forgive. “You always said I looked a lot like Grandma.”

  Her mother glanced at him. “Small children don’t understand family secrets, and we needed to tell you something you could repeat because we knew you would repeat it.” Her sentence sounded rehearsed. “But now you’re old enough to understand, and you need to. We’re your parents, not your biological parents, but still your real parents. We love you, Avy, we always did and we always will.”

  “They’re going to kick me out of college.”

  “First they have to prove your legal status,” he said.

  “They can tell just by looking.”

  “It will take more than that.” He sniffled again. “They’d need conclusive evidence, and in the meantime there’s a case that should overturn the entire executive order declaring classes of citizens. It’s clearly unconstitutional. There should be an injunction within a month.”

  “In the meantime,” Avril said, “dupes get beat up and stuff.”

  “You’re entitled to legal protection regardless of your status.”

  Yeah, that’ll work. “We know what the Supreme Court will do. Maybe I should come home.”

  Her mother sighed. “If you want to. If you’d feel safer.”

  “By the time it gets to the Supreme Court,” he said, “a lot might change. Do what you feel you need to do in order to protect yourself, and we’ll support whatever you decide, but this isn’t the end of the world.”

  It was up to her. Avril stared at the lake, its water ruffled by the wind. She could go back home, but … the mutiny couldn’t say no to her now if she was one of the kinds of people it was fighting for. Old-fashioned equality, including for all second-class and disbarred citizens. Nothing about us without us. That was an old doctrine and a good one. She could stay and fight back. Her dad was right about one thing, too. If she was anything weird, if she had some failed superpower, she’d know by now.

  But staying on campus was dangerous. The thought jolted her with a realization: She wanted danger. Injustice coalesced around her now. She could be part of the mutiny, a big part.

  “I think I’ll try to stay.”

  “I’m proud of you,” her father said. He seemed to be thinking. “In the meantime, I recommend against contacting that woman with the mammoth. That would only make it easier for you two to be connected and your status to be confirmed. Besides, she might not know.” He thought again, and his hand with the swirls inked into the skin on his fingers clenched in a white-knuckled fist. He was angry, very angry, but not with her. “I’m glad you want to go on with your life, but there might be a fight, and it will likely be long and hard.”

  Her mother added, “You’re being very brave and understanding about this. We want you to know we love you.”

  “We brought some information for you,” he said. “It’s printed on paper so it will be hard to trace, and it will tell you more about yourself. Now that you know, you should know everything.”

  This was as much of an apology as she was going to get, even though she deserved a lot more. They weren’t even really her parents. She didn’t have real parents.

  “The whole truth.” She stood up.

  They both stood up, too.

  “We’ll be here for you,” her mother said.

  Avril couldn’t think of a way to refuse to walk them up to the room to collect their electronics and then back to their car, so she did, and after hugs and murmurs of “I love you” that she couldn’t avoid without making things worse, her mother took an envelope from her purse and handed it to her, and they left.

  She sent Shinta an all-clear message and went to the room, clutching the envelope. There seemed to be only one sheet of paper inside.

  She opened the envelope the moment the door to the dorm room was closed behind her. The sheet looked to be a copy from an official document with parts of it erased—everything that would have identified it as hers.

  Baby girl, 8.22 pounds, 21.2 inches, vaginal delivery, no complications, inconsequential scalp bruising. Full-term SongLab zygote AP 5Y08SD71x6.

  That was all. That was enough.

  She searched for information about SongLab. It had been based in Shanghai, China, and went out of business eleven years ago. Its owner, a woman named Peng, had been accused of creating designer babies, built piece by piece, a human being created from scratch, not just a modified real person, although Peng sold modifications, too. SongLab had promised hair and eye and skin color, body build, traits like intelligence, creativity, general personality such as extroversion or curiosity, and of course perfect health. Mix and match or choose from a catalog, get implanted, deliver nine months later, and give that beloved little bundle of joy a name.

  She’d been engineered. Blond hair, dark eyes, a bit taller than average, slim, smart enough to pick her university since her parents could pay for anything, good at math, and very healthy.

  Her parents were also white but not blond, not dark-eyed, and their faces were more angular than hers. Her mom was slim only because she got monthly microbiotic therapy. They used to tell her that she took after a grandmother who’d died before she was born, that she had her hair color and her personality. Her eyes stung. She took a deep breath.

  A quick search for “mammoth” and “Wausau” yielded the video and eventually the information that the woman was Irene Ruiz, and she could be traced through the university to her recent degree in environmental ecology. Her hometown was Madison, her mother Celia Ruiz, an artist famous for her children’s picture books. Avril had brought one of those books with her to campus from home, that was how much she’d treasured it. For a while when she was little, she had read it every day.

  Shinta arrived with a question on her face. Avril nodded—nothing more to say.

  They now shared a secret like shiny new knives. What were they going to do with it? Avril was going to carve a new persona for herself: the mutinous dupe.

  * * *

  I hadn’t seen the sun or talked to anyone for more than a day (I felt confident the clocks in my underground cell were correct) other than my distant coworkers and occasional laconic military staff who tidied and resupplied my quarters. Those conversations were limited and transactional.

  And yet, I felt uneasy, as if I’d unconsciously noted a foreshock to an earthquake. The delta cold was coming—perhaps arriving extremely soon rather than very soon. Because of that, I wanted to work at all deliberate speed, but my coworkers, perhaps even more spooked by that ineffable tremor than I was, wanted to work faster, even recklessly.

  We had found a way to suppress some of the attenuated virus’s virulence, but the people infected could still contract secondary infections because the virus could overwhelm alveolar macrophages, at least by my analysis, and the ultimate death toll would be too high.

  “This is worrisome,” I told my far-off coworkers.

  “It could be prevented by antibiotics,” said someone identified as Node 6, whose voice was static-strewn. I was Node 3. (Node 1 listened but never spoke.)

  “I don’t think that it would be practical,” Node 2 said. The voice, despite distortions, sounded female, at least to me. I thought of her as Grrl because her falsified voice growled. “We’d face a lot of problems, and a big one is quantity. We have barely enough antibiotics for normal times. We couldn’t even double the amount in a month, and we’d need a whole lot more a whole lot sooner than that.”

  “And they would only work for bacterial infections,” Node 5 said.

  “Is there a way we could make the virus cause less lung damage?” Grrl asked.

  After some discussion, we thought we could, but I saw problems with the new approach. If the virus had less ability to misappropriate the infected human’s RNA in the process of replicating itself, that might resu
lt in more antigenic shift: the virus would reproduce inaccurately and might create a variant with undesirable traits. Besides, if it couldn’t hijack the host’s RNA to reproduce rapidly, it wouldn’t be as contagious.

  After more discussion, we felt fairly certain we could change the site of the infection to the upper respiratory tract and cause what would resemble a mere head cold, which by its nature killed far fewer people: it just made them miserable. In addition, they’d sniffle and sneeze more, which would spread the virus even faster.

  “I predict a chicken soup shortage,” Grrl said.

  We began creating new schemata for such a virus and testing them on models, although that took time, especially when using whole-organism models rather than single cells.

  “I prefer working with full human models,” I said in response to complaints, “even though they have far too many moving parts. We should run a lot more models. Every model fails in one way or another to imitate reality, and we also need to compare a variety of genotypes.”

  “Humans don’t show as much variety compared with other species,” Node 5 said. “Think about chickens, how extreme some of them are.”

  I thought about bloody, dead chickens. “They’re engineered for profit, not survival. I’d like to think we’re working for survival, even if we’re swimming against the current. Profit might matter more than people in some boardrooms, but it never should to us.”

  “Those American flags will hold off the virus for only so long,” Grrl said. “The cells that really matter are brain cells, and White House policy is running short of them.”

  “Flags?” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “The Prez said to fly them to show unity against China and its illnesses.”

  The foreshock I’d sensed may have been that: an appeal to patriotism as a way to combat the politically named Sino cold. The foolishness exceeded my dismal expectations. “Flags,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Remember,” Node 5 interrupted, “our communications are monitored.”

  And so Grrl was chastened. (Or maybe I was. Hard to know.) But I felt for a moment that I’d found a true kindred spirit, and I wished I could meet her in real life—if we both lived that long.

  We split up some tasks, and I continued modeling viruses as they were envisioned. Nothing satisfied me. In some models, the virus seemed to trigger meningitis, which I saw as a proxy for a bigger problem.

  “It might cause more damage to nasal mucous membranes than we thought,” I said.

  “That’s not so bad, meningitis,” said Node 6, who minimized everything. “A known problem. Easy to treat.”

  “Meningitis, maybe,” I said, although it was not at all easy. “I have other worries. There’s a lot more out there waiting to cause a secondary infection if the host is compromised. In my day job, I’ve seen some avian coronavirus mutations that could jump to humans. We could trigger an epidemic.”

  “They’re always there, avian viruses,” Node 6 said. “Would they be as bad as Sino?” They never called it by its more technical name, which was telling.

  That gave me pause. “I honestly don’t know. I wouldn’t feel comfortable making a prediction.”

  “We know some things for sure about Sino.”

  “Let’s stay focused,” Node 5 said. “We’re on a deadline.”

  Grrl had an idea. “I think we could limit the damage. Some strains cause very mild symptoms, and we could try incorporating that.”

  “But,” Node 6 said, “it has to be symptomatic to be as contagious as we need.”

  I supported Grrl’s idea. “We can balance the needs, and I think we have to. Meningitis can strike quickly. A virus that incapacitates its hosts within hours won’t be as contagious as we want.”

  “Let’s get to work,” Grrl said, and the us in let’s meant her and me. So we worked. She knew much more about certain cellular processes than I did, and we were a good team. Buoyed by the top-quality coffee that the military supplied in endless quantities, by about three in the morning we had an effective compromise between damage and symptoms. We reported that with pride and relief, and then, to calm our jangled nerves and maintain what had become a delightful relationship, we chatted—about general science, nothing too personal, since Node 1 was always listening.

  I began to drowse and was about to say good night. Our screens beeped with an official notice. The attenuated virus had been released. With a few adaptations, mechanical cleaning machines with their little onboard fans could distribute virus-laden aerosols as effectively as the human nose.

  “Which one?” Grrl and I asked in unison. No matter which, it was far too early in the process of testing. We needed not just theoretical models but real (and courageous) human subjects. Much more important, the virus that had been released couldn’t have been our compromise. It couldn’t have been manufactured that quickly. So it was an earlier version, perhaps much earlier, and any of those viruses would result in massive, needless death.

  I wrapped my face in my hands and wept. She was shouting at people around her. I could make out some of the words in her rising panic.

  “Everywhere?” her distorted voice roared.

  CHAPTER

  4

  Irene carried a coil of barbed wire to the pen for repairs. Nimkii had to know he could get out of the pen any time he wanted, but he hadn’t tried for the rest of the day yesterday or so far today. Perhaps he was too frightened of the wider world. She’d slept outside that night to guard him. He seemed to want to stay near her, so she’d laid a sleeping bag on bales of hay at the far side of the pen from the breach.

  She’d woken up several times during the night with a desperate question: Why don’t all these mosquitoes drive him crazy? Because they were giving her nightmares. And each time, he had been right there on the other side of the fences, as close as he could be, and she kept thinking of how it would feel to hug him again, knowing that she never would. He had seemed gentle, but that was when he was afraid. Now he was in familiar surroundings, and he might react violently.

  Never. But as much as that hurt, now the sun was up, it was Saturday morning, and she had to repair his pen as best she could.

  Alan stopped her. “We can’t keep him here.”

  Irene had already realized that, and her heart ached sharp enough to bleed. “I know. He needs a better pen anyway.” Maybe a new home would be an improvement. Maybe, if Nimkii was lucky and a better home could be found. But now that the video had been passed around, she might need to leave, too, for her own safety, or as soon as Alan and Ruby found out about her unnatural status.

  “It’s a question of money,” he said. “Already with new rationing coming soon and stuff, Ruby says the price of feed just went up.”

  New rationing is coming? She hadn’t heard that yet, but feed providers would have inside information. They’d need more money. “I have some ideas for fundraising.”

  “That doesn’t matter. We can’t keep him. I’m seeing where we can send him.” Did he look relieved? At least he wanted to send him away. The owners of some engineered dinosaurs in Florida had shot them when a huge hurricane approached.

  Irene nodded, afraid that if she tried to speak again, she’d start crying. There wasn’t much choice, though. The sheriff didn’t have to say anything when he checked the pen. He just shook his head. No visitors were allowed until the pen was secured. He should have issued much tougher restrictions or an immediate order to relocate Nimkii, but he liked the farm. The need to relocate Nimkii as soon as possible remained utterly real even if it wasn’t official.

  Irene knew the wire for the repair would be as much of a barrier as dental floss. Appearances mattered, though. To distract Nimkii, she winched a cardboard box of carrot-top greens, discards from a food-processing plant, into the pen, and as soon as he started eating, she rushed to the other side of the pen and waded through the moat carrying a bag of supplies.

  He looked up and watched her intently.

  She needed to fix the
water trough. She’d been winching buckets over into the pen, but he needed a lot more water than that. He started to walk toward her, so she ran as close as she could without being within reach, set down her hat, and rushed back to her work. She’d given him one of her hats before and he’d destroyed it, which had broken her heart, but at least it might keep him busy. Her heart would never mend, no matter what.

  She began to connect the original pipes with the trough’s faucet and drain using pieces of hose. It was a half-assed repair that he could wreck with one kick, but maybe he wouldn’t. The threads didn’t catch right away. Come on. Screw in! If she hurried less, she might finish sooner.

  He was muttering and rumbling, fiddling with her hat and looking at her. She had to admit it, finally: he frightened her. He was a violent, unpredictable animal. She had been so lucky.

  But he wasn’t destroying her hat. He sniffed it and brushed it against his face and kept watching her.

  When she was done with the pipe and had strung a couple of lines of wire between the fence posts, scratching her hands as she did, she ran to the inner gate and slipped out. On the other side, she turned to wave goodbye. He walked toward her as fast as he could, holding out the hat.

  He was going to return her hat!

  “Nimkii! My mighty steed!” A tear rolled down into the corner of her mouth, salty and chilled by the air. She reached out her hand. He came closer, too close for safety, but she was sure he wouldn’t hurt her. His carrot-scented breath warmed her face. He stretched out his trunk and put the hat on her head.

  “Nimkii! Thank you, Nimkii.”

  He touched her outstretched hand with the tip of his trunk, and she clasped the moist thumb tight.

  “You know I love you, pedazo. They’re going to send you away. I’ll always love you.”

  He pulled his trunk back and rumbled—a low, beautiful purr.

  Of course he hadn’t understood. Of course he hadn’t said “I love you, too” back. Or maybe he had. She wanted to believe that he had.