Ode To Defiance Chapter 12

7

Race for the Cure

Many scientists are on the autism scale, so technically, autism causes vaccines.

—Anonymous viral Facebook observation, 2019

Amanda stood at the podium of the

Chiron’s

auditorium. A hushed crowd of scientists sat waiting for her. She saw her old friend Simon Bingham waiting patiently in the front row. A woman of apparent Native American heritage waited beside him with no patience whatsoever, fidgeting as he repeatedly whispered words meant to calm her down—words that failed dismally. Many of the others waited in a state of mild shock at the sequence of events that had brought them here.

“Welcome aboard, everyone.” She scanned the audience, nodding to a number of scattered members of the crowd whom she knew. “Welcome to my home. I know a number of you, and a number of you know me, but for the rest, I am Amanda Copeland, head of BrainTrust medical research and currently Chairman of the Board for the BrainTrust Consortium. So not only do I understand the technical details of the problem we face, but I also understand the tools we have available to address that problem. To put it succinctly, this project has the full resources of the BrainTrust archipelago at its disposal.”

Velma yelled, “Do we have labs to work in? When can we see them? If they aren’t biosafety level four, we’ve got squat.”

Amanda glared at her. “You can see them when you have a clue how they work. They’re rather different from what you’re used to.” She lifted her eyes from Velma. “But you’re quite right; we must get to work. So I’d like to introduce you to Dr. Dyah Ambarawati, whom you all might as well get used to addressing as Dash.” Amanda waved to the small Balinese scientist in her signature white lab coat waiting to the side. “Dash, they’re all yours.”

Dash hurried out and launched without further introduction into the technologies they would work with. She looked directly at the fiery woman in the first row. “To address your concern, since we heard about the epidemic, we’ve had swarms of bots working 24/7 to bring up a series of room-size Class III biosafety cabinets, the most important component of a level four lab. We’re turning the whole Red Planet deck into a level four facility, more or less.”

Velma spluttered. “Room-size cabinets? How can we work with those? Gloves won’t reach. If it’s room-size, it needs to be a protective-suit lab.”

Dash paused in the face of this vehemence.

Another woman, tall, lithe, with a skin tone similar to Dash’s, rose from a corner seat in the front row. “Hi, everyone. I’m Chance Dixon, Dash’s partner. Any time you have a question, you can ask me.” She glared at the demanding woman. “Including you. We’ll get to work a helluva lot faster without the interruptions. Things are different here, and you’ll see why, get calm, and learn something. Bots are the answer you’re looking for. The answer that you didn’t think of because you’re ignorant of the possibilities.”

After a moment, Dash answered the question more politely. “We make the cabinets room-size or even larger and work remotely using bots inside the cabinets. We’ll have a bot wrangler assigned to each cabinet to operate them according to your instructions until such time as you are trained to wrangle the bots yourselves.” She saw the woman in the front row gearing up to speak again. “Who are you, please?”

“I’m Velma Highwalker, and—”

Simon interrupted, “—and she’s one of our best when she’s working rather than complaining.”

Velma glared at them both. “What if the cabinets leak?”

Dash twitched her nose. “We have some standard procedures. For example, the whole deck is now partially sealed and over-pressured outside the cabinets. We also have some nonstandard defenses in place: outside the cabinets, the whole area is now flooded with UV-C radiation.”

Velma glared. “UV-C? UV lighting is against regs. What’s UV-C?”

Amanda came back out to join Dash. “UV-C is part of our standard isle ship defenses against airborne infections, and you’ve never heard of it because it never got certified for use for sanitization dirtside. It’s a higher-frequency form of ultraviolet than the UV-A and UV-B people worry about when getting suntans.”

A twitter of laughter ran through the audience, then stopped as everyone remembered how serious the situation was again.

Amanda continued, “Understand, Dr. Highwalker, the BrainTrust knows a little bit about reducing the risks from infectious diseases. Cruise liners before the advent of isle ships were infamous as breeding grounds for disease, and once a norovirus started up, it quickly swept through the entire ship.”

Amanda took a breath. “These outbreaks were always more rare than the news stories would lead you to suspect, but when they occurred, they were acute. We couldn’t afford any outbreaks like that since everybody on the BrainTrust has too much work to do, so we added a number of measures to our ships after the first norovirus outbreak fifteen years ago. We circulate air at twice the rate of the old cruise liners, we have bots continuously disinfecting all the public surfaces, we have UV-C irradiating the flow in the air ducts 24/7, and any time a passage or a cabin is unoccupied, we flood the area with UV-A, B, and C light. We still have infectious outbreaks, but they never become acute.”

Velma grumbled. “It’s still a far cry from a biosafety level-four system.”

Chance interceded. “Which is why we’ve retrofitted the deck where we have the biosafety cabinets with additional precautions. I’ll go over it all with you myself.

After

we’re done here.”

Dash popped the image of a large machine onto the screen behind her for all to see. “This is a CRISPIER.”

The room hushed. Everyone had heard of the CRISPIERs. Everyone had wanted to try one out. Amanda had been reluctant to sell one to anybody because they were still too cranky and too hard to operate, though she had yielded to Dash’s request to build enough to support a whole floor of rejuvenation patients, for whom the CRISPIERs were required.

Even Velma shut up and listened as Dash dived into the details of what a CRISPIER could do and how it could help them end the plague.

Gina eyed Colin suspiciously. She liked Colin all right, but somehow he always seemed to have an additional plan in mind. It usually worked out for everyone, but…she still eyed him suspiciously.

Colin addressed her and her husband Matt Toscano, Werner Halstead, Alex Turner, and Dawn Rainer with considerable urgency. “So you see, we need all your help to pull this off. If we don’t come up with a mass production capability, it’ll make no difference whether Dash and her team come up with a vaccine or not.”

They were all seated in a conference room on the the

Argus

, the BrainTrust’s own manufacturing ship.

Alex raised his hand as if asking permission to speak, then spoke. “Have you talked to Amanda about this?”

Colin nodded. “The Consortium is all in. You’re fully authorized to put the

Argus

to work full-time on the manufacture of CRISPIERs.”

Dawn interrupted, “This’ll put us behind schedule on getting our new isle ships fully operational, won’t it?” She scowled. “I don’t like it.”

Gina touched Dawn on the shoulder, trying to calm her down.

Alex disregarded all this. “What about the

Hephaestus

?” The

Hephaestus

was an isle ship manned only by robots and anchored far from the main archipelago, where toxic materials were handled. It too was a manufacturing vessel, though rather specialized in its equipment.

Colin looked back and forth at Dawn and Alex, clearly trying to decide which one to answer first. Gina figured Alex had asked the easier question, and sure enough, Colin answered him. “If you can use the

Hephaestus

, by all means, go for it.”

Colin turned back to Dawn. “You don’t need to complete your ships to get them productive, it turns out. Thank you, by the way, for supplying berths for the CDC scientists on the

Eos

.”

The

Eos

was one of the two ships Gina and Dawn were building; it was the one closest to completion. The quarters were incomplete and unadorned, but the beds were comfortable, and far better than sleeping in the passageways of the

Chiron

.

Gina noted with some amusement that many of the scientists were sleeping in the passageways of the

Chiron

anyway, to lose not a minute of working time.

Dawn shrugged. “Renting the

Eos

was hardly an act of charity. Simon promised to pay us back as soon he could access CDC funds again.”

Gina pushed Dawn on the matter. “But let’s face it: there’s still a lot of risk there. He may never get access to the CDC again. We’ll be in pretty bad shape if that happens.” At least, Gina would be in bad shape. For Gina, those ships were make or break. For Dawn, it was an amusing side investment.

Dawn acknowledged the problem. “True enough, but we still have an avenue to profitability. What do we have here? Colin, will the Consortium rent our second ship as a place to set up a vaccine-production facility? I think Simon’s pretty tapped out, even if he does get back to the CDC.”

Colin winced. “Well, actually, we’re hoping that you’ll buy in for a percentage of the profits.”

Matt and Dawn guffawed together. Matt took up the criticism. “So, let’s see now. You want me to turn the

Helios

into a CRISPIER manufacturing ship, along with the

Argus

and the

Hephaestus

. Then the CRISPIERs go onto Dawn and Gina’s ship and start producing vaccine?”

Colin nodded mutely.

“And how do we make a profit?”

Colin explained. “It’ll be a more or less standard manufacturer/distributor/customer business enterprise. The distributors will buy product from us and get reimbursed by the customers.”

Dawn responded with pure scorn. “No pharmaceutical chain is going to touch this without an FDA certification. Do you expect to get certified?”

Colin laughed. “Not a chance. We’ll have to go a little less traditional.” He explained his worst-case plan.

Dawn and Matt joined everyone else in laughing.

Alex brought up another point. “You know, loading a boat with CRISPIERs may work for this one emergency if we can get ahead of this virus before the whole world is infected. But the CRISPIER is not a mass-production device. We need a better solution, and it probably needs to be someplace else. An isle ship is a damned expensive piece of real estate for a factory to produce low-cost pharmaceuticals.”

Colin nodded. “Already working on it.”

Dawn thumped her fist on the table. “In any event, I’m in.” She looked at her business partner. “Assuming Gina is in.”

Gina moved her arms in an energetic albeit truncated version of one of the cheers she had led in college. “Let’s go!”

Velma highlighted another molecular structure on the wallscreen. “As you can see, this is one of the elements of the protein coat that distinguishes Blue Rubola from the measles rubeola virus.” She growled in frustration. “The viruses are so similar, it’s incredible that the measles vaccine doesn’t work at all. Like, not at all.”

Dash studied the image. “It’s not that surprising. Antibodies are very specific indeed. This just looks like normal, natural genetic mutation from here.” She sounded as if she were still hopeful that Blue Rubola was a natural phenomenon, not an engineered bioweapon.

Chance, with a more negative view of human behavior, squashed any such optimism. “The big differences are in the nuclei. Look at these sections of the RNA transcript.” She pointed at several sections. “Somewhere in these segments, there are explanations of why Blue Rubola is so much more infectious and so much more lethal.”

Velma waved her hands impatiently. “Yeah, yeah, we need to figure that out someday, but today we need to focus on that protein coat.”

Simon entered the room. “I can put a team to work studying the RNA, figuring out what’s what.”

Velma practically screamed, “We don’t have the manpower.”

Simon closed his eyes. “We certainly do. Not everyone here specializes in the same thing, Velma. Some of them are experts specifically in molecular simulations, and about half of them will soon be twiddling their thumbs.”

Dash changed the subject. “Simon, how is everyone else doing?”

Simon chuckled tiredly. “I’ve got almost everybody working on something. We have separate teams researching each of the major approaches to creating a vaccine. One team is trying to make an attenuated live virus akin to the one we use for measles, another team is trying to create a dead virus, and a third is focused on manufacturing just enough of the protein coat to stimulate the creation of antibodies.”

Chance nodded vigorously at the last. “Manufacturing a part of the protein coat—that’s where the CRISPIER will help. I’ll get on it as soon as we’re done here.”

Velma jumped in. “Then let’s be done. More talking isn’t going to help.”

Dash held up a finger. “Actually, I have an additional idea. It occurs to me that we could use the CRISPIER to directly manufacture the antibodies.” Her eyes brightened as she had yet another idea. “Or we could design injectable factories that would manufacture antibodies.”

Velma got excited. “If we could inject enough antibodies, it would sort of be a cure, and if it slowed the virus down enough, it would work as a vaccine as well, giving the body enough time to figure out how to make the antibodies on its own.” She shivered. “How would these factories work?”

Dash started to explain how the CRISPIER could be used in this fashion, quite different from the way it was used for her normal rejuvenation work, figuring it out as she went along.

Simon whispered to Chance, “Go talk to the team working on the protein coat vaccine. See how you can help.”

Amanda came in carrying a tray. “Anyone care for some illegal drugs?”

Velma and Simon looked aghast; Chance and Dash looked puzzled. Dash made the obvious observation. “I didn’t think any drugs were illegal here on the BrainTrust.”

Amanda chuckled. “Oh, there are actually a couple we frown upon. But you’re right, nothing’s banned outright. People who get themselves messed up so badly they can’t do their jobs and don’t respond to therapy are invited to leave.” She set the tray down. “What I’ve got here is Modafinil.”

Simon blinked. “Used to prevent narcolepsy, right?”

Amanda nodded. “And one of the most popular drugs abused by college students as a study drug. It’ll keep you awake and alert for an extra twelve hours.”

Simon replied slowly. “I suppose it’s illegal without a prescription, but it’s hardly heroin.”

Chance injected, “Seems likely we can get prescriptions if we really want them. Is there anybody here who

isn’t

authorized to write prescriptions?”

Amanda picked up her pill bottle and started dispensing oblong white pills with L234 printed on the side. “You don’t need to take it if you don’t want to, but if you find yourself in the middle of a task and you’re falling asleep, this will get you through the project.” She pursed her lips. “The epidemiologists are estimating almost half a million people are infected already. If the mortality projections hold up, we’re looking at fifty thousand deaths.”

Simon whispered, “And the day is young.”

Maneuvering ever so slowly, flying nearly blind with nothing but the paltry help of night-vision goggles to assist him, Wolf dropped the stealth copter onto the roof of one of the buildings in the University of California San Francisco Helen Diller Medical Center in Parnassus Heights. He’d studied pictures of the place before taking off. The campus featured a forest of randomly sized white skyscrapers packed so densely that, were they alive, they would all be choked to death.

He got out of the copter, found an access door to the roof, broke in ever so quietly, and made his way down to the first floor, clutching a backpack with a handful of small bots.

Wolf could not believe why he was here.

In order to manufacture the antibodies and the antibody factories to make the cure (Dash said it wasn’t really a cure, but as nearly as Wolf could figure, it was), Dash needed the existing antibodies from people who were infected. To get the antibodies, she needed blood samples.

But the scientists from the CDC had left Atlanta with barely the shirts on their backs, plus the occasional thumb drive full of data.

And now no one was willing to give them blood samples. When they’d called the CDC, an FBI honcho had answered and offered to send all the materials they wanted as soon as the BrainTrust sent back all the scientists for questioning. Colin called the Chief Advisor and got essentially the same answer. A phone call to the Governor of California got intercepted by the Attorney General, who told them to go to hell.

As Wolf understood it, Chance had been climbing on board a copter to fly to San Francisco to get some goddam samples herself when Simon intercepted her and demanded she get back to work and said there were tasks that needed her skills more, but did she have any ideas about who might be a good choice for this mission?

So Chance had called him, and here he was. He did have some expertise in stealth recon, and it was not all that much different. Well, it was entirely different, but he was happy to volunteer.

The medical systems of all the major California cities were already being overwhelmed. Here in this complex, the dental clinics building, a little separate from the main cluster, and its adjoining parking lot had been turned into a makeshift isolation unit. Wolf pulled on a lab coat—ridiculously tight on him, but he left it unbuttoned so he still had circulation through his arms—and made his way confidently across the campus to the place where, if he were not careful, he’d catch the infection and die.

Fortunately, he did not have to go all the way into the building or screw with a moon suit (as if there were a chance he could find one that fit). He stopped outside, dropped his little robotic friends on the concrete, and guided them through the door he held open for them.

Now all Wolf had to do was play the video game on his bot control console, driving the bots through the wards, having them sneak up on sleeping and unconscious patients, and slurping up a little blood.

Soon the bots were done. They exited through the parking lot that had been cordoned off but not sealed, sprayed each other with short blasts of hot decontamination foam, and made their way back to him.

Suddenly he heard a loud male voice bearing down on him. “Are they insane? They can’t just close down the CDC in an emergency like this. Those people need to get back to work!”

Two people in lab coats, a man and a woman, practically ran over him in their haste. The man who had been speaking confronted him. “Who the hell are you?” He looked at the control console in Wolf’s hands, heard the soft clacking of the bots running back to him, and pulled out his phone. “You stand right there until someone comes for you.”

Wolf’s first thought was to knock them both out swiftly before the doctor finished dialing. He could do it, of course.

But even if they placed the call, Wolf was still sure he could get away. So he tried something else. “Let me explain what I’m doing here.” He continued to explain as he picked up the bots and put them back in the backpack. In the end, he looked helplessly down at the doctor before him.

The doctor bit his lip. “So, you’re here from the BrainTrust? You need samples? And those imbeciles won’t give them to you?” He looked at his companion.

She gave him a half-laugh. “I just can’t help thinking that they’re on our side.”

The doctor nodded grudgingly. “Come inside for a moment.”

Wolf followed them into the room separated from the isolation unit by a large window and an airlock. The doctor went into the airlock and pulled on a moonsuit, then disappeared into the main facility.

Half an hour later, he came out and placed a large foam box in Wolf’s hands. Opening it briefly, they could see rows of vials, each packed in a separate form-fitting hole in the foam. “They’re all labeled. Be damn careful with them, obviously.”

As Wolf carefully resealed the box, the doctor pulled out a business card. “I’m Doctor Lancaster. If there’s anything else you need, call.”

Velma and Ted scrutinized the operation of the bots in Biosafety Cabinet Seven. They were in the main shopping area in the middle of the Red Planet deck, decorated as a relentless Mars-scape of red rock, relieved only in one place where the geodesic dome enclosing the Falcon’s Nest colony sank into the red dirt.

At the moment, much of the austere beauty of the Martian surface was obscured by the Class III biosafety cabinets that had supplanted the shops.

Watching as one bot moved swiftly to pour the wrong vial into the wrong Petri dish, Velma jerked her hand up in a helpless gesture. “Stop!”

Ted mashed a button, and all five of the bots in Cabinet Seven froze. “Sorry. This is darn tricky, and we don’t have hardly any preprogrammed subtask modules to help.” In the days before Ted’s copter design and manufacturing business took off, he’d supported himself while taking Accel classes and designing copters by wrangling bots when someone needed extra help.

Five bots were about half what a typical wrangler could manage on a normal job and a quarter of what Ted had often controlled. “I need to take some serious time to upgrade the software on all these bots. We’re wasting too much effort.” He pointed at the rows of cabinets running off to the left and the right. “All of us are wasting our time.”

Velma built up some venom to chew Ted out, but Dash walked up at that moment and intervened. “You’re right, of course. Colin talked to Lenora, Chen Ying, and Jun Laquan about helping make these bots more effective.” She chuckled. “Though from what I’ve heard of Jun, he’s at least as likely to design a whole new bot for us as to help with the current ones.” She looked down at her tablet. “Chen Ying and Jun should be on Matt’s Global Express by now.” She turned to Velma. “You’ll meet them in a couple of hours.”

Ted, although working furiously, still had the mental capacity for conversation. “Dr. Dash! I haven’t seen you in an age. I hear your family’s coming to visit.”

Dash smiled. “My aunt and uncle and my cousin will be coming once we have this emergency out of the way.” The smile faded. “My uncle is not in very good shape. I’ve tested him, and he qualifies for rejuvenation.”

Velma, still watching the bots as they started up again—more slowly this time—asked distractedly. “I thought your rejuv was still crazy expensive.”

Dash sighed. “Somewhat less so than when we started, but yes. I’m paying for my uncle myself.” She brightened. “I can’t wait to introduce you all to my cousin Astri. She’s very outgoing and exuberant, even by American standards, to say nothing of Balinese.”

Velma harrumphed. “Unlike you, so grumpy all the time.”

They heard a commotion down the passageway as a large number of people approached.

Velma turned to them and demanded, “Who are you? How the hell did you get in here?”

The leader, a young man with the pasty white skin suggesting he was a software engineer, brought the small mob to a halt. “I’m Chad Duncan, and we’re your lab rats.”

Dash and Velma both looked at him without full comprehension.

“Colin’s been talking to people all over the archipelago, identifying volunteers for your first human trials. I understand you’re pretty close to having something to try.” Chad gulped. “He says, and I agree, that we have to short-circuit the usual testing process here, sort of like you did for rejuv. Except the stakes are higher.”

Another one of the new lab rats, a woman about the same age as Chad, augmented this. “We hear almost two hundred thousand people are already projected to die.”

Dash looked at them with consternation. “We bypassed almost every tenet of medical testing for the rejuvenation therapy because we could run our tests on people who were already dying. You are not.”

Chad waved his hand at the people behind him. “But our families might as well be dying. Most of us are Americans. If we can help protect them, we will.”

Dash objected. “We are not going to try this on perfectly healthy people as the first thing. For one thing, when we first test the live attenuated virus, we could actually give you Blue Rubola.” But the more she thought about it, the fewer alternative ideas she had.

Velma intervened, delighted with the volunteers, completely blowing Dash off. “Yeah, Dash, sure, it’d be nice to have some people already at risk to experiment with. But how are we going to get test subjects with Blue Rubola out here? That would be dangerous to the whole archipelago. And we sure can’t go to them. The Feds would have us in chains in a heartbeat.” She held out her hand to Chad. “Velma Highwalker. Overjoyed to meet you.”

Dash frowned. “But…” She tried to formulate an objection, then threw up her hands. “I’ll need blood samples from all of you. Follow me.”

Velma tossed aside the pillow covering her eyes and rose blearily from the cot. She had slept, sort of, in a passage near the Red Planet shopping area where the biosafety cabinets resided. Although she had been assigned a real bed in a real cabin on the

Eos

, she, like many of the others, was hot-bunking by her experiments. She had just finished a quick nap while her experiments were running, between the times of furious activity as they analyzed the results of one experiment and set up the next.

Velma no longer had any idea whether it was night or day outside. In addition to all the other changes, they’d set the lighting to a constant lab-level brilliance for the duration of the emergency.

The BrainTrust had continuously upgraded the equipment as the work progressed. They now had a CRISPIER for every scientist on the deck. Chunks of every data center in the archipelago, from the

GPlex III

to the

BrainTrust University

, had been rented to run billions of simulations.

Hundreds of robotically managed experiments in petri dishes looked for a fragment of Rubola protein coat they could mass-produce that would also properly trigger the B-lymphocytes. Once triggered, these specialized white blood cells would transform into a cluster of plasma cells that poured out antibodies.

Meanwhile, other hundreds of experiments sought variations of the antibodies from rubola victims that were also mass-producible and effective.

As Velma approached her cabinet, Ted fiddled with the bot controls. Samples from the petri dishes slid into digital microscopes, and a number of videos popped onto Velma’s tablet.

A restaurant bot, commandeered into the project, handed her an espresso as she glanced at the results of the latest experiments.

Suddenly she no longer needed the caffeinated coffee to get her blood flowing; an adrenalin rush gave her all the energy she needed. She put her coffee cup on the desk where Ted sat and slaved a part of the promenade’s renderable wall to her tablet. With a whoop, she wrapped her arms around an astonished Ted Simpson and kissed him on the cheek. “Everybody, come see!”

On the wall, a video of molecular structures flowed—incomprehensible to any normal person yet easily understood by the scientists of the Red Planet deck. The key element of the video was this: the smaller molecules were clumping around the larger structures and encasing them, almost like foam drowning a car on fire.

The viral particles were being neutralized with speedy dispatch.

A cheer started, and Simon yelled, “Velma, you’ve done it!”

Everyone crowded around her, congratulating her.

Moments later, Dash and Chance rushed into the promenade with exciting news of their own. They stopped before reaching the packed crowd around Velma.

Dash watched the celebration with a philosophical smile.

Chance muttered grouchily, “Well, it’s great that Velma figured out the vaccine. But you just figured out how to inject antibody factories that don’t even need to go through the step of stimulating the white blood cells.”

Dash shrugged. “My molecular factories get filtered out of the bloodstream after a day or so. They can keep a patient alive for a while, but we need the traditional vaccine as well.”

Chance frowned. “But…Velma’s merely developed a vaccine. You’ve made an extraordinary breakthrough! Something new under the sun! You can even save people who are already deep in the grip of the infection!”

Dash answered sternly, “And we’ll tell Simon and the others in a little while. After Velma’s received all the congratulations she can stand.”

She pulled out her phone. “In the meantime, we can tell Amanda to gear up the mass production system. With the two victories we’ve just achieved, I’m thinking we can start trials on our local volunteers this afternoon, and unless something goes wrong, manufacture our first shipment of vaccine in the morning.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m saying that. Talk about a truncated test and evaluation process!”

Chance grunted. “Meanwhile, I suppose we should go congratulate her.”

Dash frowned. “Why don’t we wait a couple of minutes, until the crowd thins out?”

Chance remained grumpy. “Sure. Then she can gloat more.”

Dr. Lancaster was rushing down the street to the isolation unit, now bursting to overflowing, trying to figure out where to put the next batch of patients. He was indescribably tired. And defeated. It was getting worse, and he knew nothing that could stop it from getting far worse indeed.

As he rounded a corner, he found the same enormous man standing in the same place where Lancaster had accosted him several days ago, holding a foam box that looked identical to the box Lancaster had given him.

Lancaster raised an eyebrow. “Need more samples?”

The man shook his head, his eyes alight with good humor. “Presents.” He carefully opened the box. “This may be both a vaccine and a partial cure.”

Lancaster’s raised eyebrow rose further. “You apparently don’t know it doesn’t work like that.”

The man’s expression turned stubborn. “Dr. Dash said that that wasn’t a good way of saying it, but she said there was a grain of truth in it.” He pulled out a sheet of paper and handed it over. “This is what Dr. Dash actually says about it.”

As Lancaster read the missive, his heart started to beat harder, and he straightened from the slumped, tired, nearly hopeless posture he had fallen into a few days ago. “If this works, you’ve just saved tens of millions of lives in the United States alone.”

The man put a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Let’s try it before we get too excited,” he said, echoing a passage from Dash’s missive.

Lancaster took the precious box, suppressing an urge to hug it. “How will I contact you to let you know what happens?”

“My name is Wolf, Dr. Lancaster, and you’ll find both Dr. Dash and me on speed dial here.” He slipped a cell phone into Lancaster’s pocket. “This is a BrainTrust phone, so we can talk in private.”

Wolf nodded and walked away.

Lancaster hurried into the building, into his moonsuit, and into the part of the isolation unit where the patients with nothing left to hope for except swift death resided.

Twenty-four hours later, he took a deep breath and called Dash. “I injected two dozen patients in the terminal ward. Normally there’s a ninety-five mortality rate among them. Today, three-quarters of the patients I injected are showing signs of improvement. It’s hardly even a preliminary result, but…please send me as much of your vaccine as you can.

Please

.”

Rodrick Sprague, the recently minted Acting Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, sat down in the chair facing the Chief Advisor’s desk.

He gripped the leather arms of his chair, firmly suppressing his thrill at being here, called in to give advice to the most important man in the world on the most important assault on the most important country in all the history of the world.

The old commissioner, Horacio Chapin, had in Rodrick’s opinion always been a poor one. He’d been a hasty fellow, always talking urgently about new ideas for how to streamline processes, reduce costs, and get solutions into the hands of the health care system ASAP.

Of course, that enthusiasm for innovation had done Horacio little good. The regulators of the FDA had held firm on their standards, and the commissioner had had very few successes—few enough that Rodrick had been expecting Chapin to resign for some time.

Really, the old commissioner had been a borderline loon. It cost millions of dollars in research and analysis to eliminate a regulation. If people had jumped every time Chapin proposed a faster, lower-cost way of getting things done, the FDA would be bankrupt by now. And at least one new drug or medical instrument that slipped through Horacio’s streamlined certification process would have killed somebody, leading to a blistering news media assault on the agency.

Worse, Chapin had refused to honor the President for Life with fervent support. Chapin never said anything critical, but often when a staff member praised the President or the Chief Advisor, Rodrick had seen Chapin press his lips together in a thin, disapproving line. Radical ideas proposed by a man like that obviously should be dismissed out of hand.

The country was fortunate that Commissioner Chapin had died in a freak car accident a few weeks earlier. His self-driving car had veered off the Francis Scott Key Bridge into the Potomac for no apparent reason.

Now that control of the FDA had returned to the competent hands of a serious professional, the country was much safer. No matter how much panic roiled across the nation, the FDA would stand firm, a rock of calm competence that would ensure proper procedures were followed properly. Only in this way could the safety of the people be protected in the long term.

The Chief Advisor jumped right to the point. “Got a call from the BrainTrust. They say they have a vaccine for Blue Rubola, and all we need to do to stop the disease is to let them ship it to us.” He pursed his lips. “They say it even works for most of the people who already have the disease as long as they aren’t too far gone.”

Rodrick rolled his eyes. “And this is why you can’t trust anybody who’s in business just for profit. As any first-year medical student can tell you, that’s not possible. Vaccines don’t work that way.”

The Chief Advisor took a deep breath. “Still, it’s the BrainTrust. I don’t like those sardines-packed-in-a-can any more than you do. Probably less. But they do create new things—unheard of things—pretty often.”

Rodrick’s expression turned sour. “Maybe, maybe not. Even if they did develop some fancy new trick, they can’t possibly have put it through anything like a proper certification process. For all we know, it would kill even more people than Blue Rubola.”

The Chief Advisor blinked. “Really? Because I’m hearing reports that the death rate from the disease is over ten percent.”

The acting commissioner waved it away. “Preliminary numbers only. You’re getting that from the CDC, right? The second-raters who’re left since the top epidemiologists abandoned their posts and snuck off to the BrainTrust?”

The Advisor nodded reluctantly. “Although I suspect they’re talking to and working with the people who went to the BrainTrust.”

Sprague leaned forward. “And who among them has a reason to tell the truth? The bigger the crisis appears, the more likely they think we are to panic and pardon them

en masse

.”

He leaned back again in his chair. “Besides, I’ve just heard a report from one of the University of California medical centers. In San Francisco. Apparently the lethality of the disease has dropped off dramatically. It looks like the disease is unstable, and mutating to a more benign form.”

The acting commissioner shrugged. “That’s a common pattern for diseases, of course, but it seems to be happening with extraordinary speed with this engineered bioweapon. This genetically-edited virus is unnatural, and falling apart as we speak.”

The Chief Advisor visibly relaxed. “That’s a relief. Still, any idea what the status is for developing a vaccine of our own?”

Rodrick twitched his nose. “I don’t really know. I’d imagine it’s slow going since we lost so many key personnel.” He shook his finger in a sign of commitment. “But rest assured, the moment they have something, we’ll give it top priority. We’ll cut every legitimate corner to get it out quickly. Six months from the moment they put something legitimate in our hands, we’ll release it.”

He thought about it for a moment. “Or nine months, to be realistic. Call it nine months.”

Colin hung up the phone after talking with the Chief Advisor one last time. A huge roomful of people held their breaths: Matt, Gina, Dawn, Dash, Chance, Simon, and Velma, among others. “No dice. Looks like we’re going with Plan B.”

Dawn shrugged. “Probably more profitable anyway.”

Dash glared. “That is hardly the most important aspect.”

Dawn smiled warmly at the woman who had, if only for a day, brought Dawn’s mother back to life. “And it’ll save millions of lives, too. I’m very excited.”

Getting the word out to the people of America that the BrainTrust had a vaccine that could also cure many of the people already infected was easy. The Federal and California governments could not stop the flood of messages from the former CDC scientists that had gone, well, viral.

Having failed to prevent the dissemination of the BrainTrust’s information, the governments had tried to bury it with denunciations, labeling the vaccine a child-killer, among other things, and also asserting that Blue Rubola was not actually as dangerous as fearmongers would have you believe. Peculiarly, the more the Red and Blue governments berated the vaccine, the more eagerly people sought to get their hands on it.

Of course, getting the vaccine into those hands was a little trickier.

Trey stood on his corner taking orders and collecting money, watching his business hop. That was literally true. In the old days, when he used to hold the drugs for his father, he had dispensed the purchases directly to the buyers in their cars.

In the modern era, when his little brother held the drugs and did the distribution, over half the deliveries were made by drone copter. One such copter was hopping down by his brother now, having fulfilled an order. Another was hopping up, up, and away on a trip, probably to the suburbs.

The delivery process was not the only thing that had changed in the illegal drug industry. Two key societal and regulatory changes had transformed every aspect of the business.

The first thing that had happened was the country had gone crazy legalizing marijuana, his father’s most popular product. Sure, the margins were better on coke, but weed was the staple in his corner of the world.

With pot legalization, times had gotten tough until the government bailed them out by introducing rapidly increasing regulatory hurdles for procuring opioids. Driven by a burst of media frenzy over the opioid death rate, it had taken only a few years to reach the tipping point—the moment at which it became easier to buy pain medication from street dealers than from pharmacies.

After his dad went to jail, Trey had remade himself as one of the entrepreneurs on the forefront in the reborn industry. Soon Vicodin was his top-selling item.

Of course, with the change in products came a change in clientele. Whereas his father had mostly served college kids looking for a score, now a majority of Trey’s customers were elderly retirees looking for the relief they needed to get out of bed in the morning.

It was hard for these new customers to get down to his corner in Compton, so taking innovation to the next step, Trey had introduced copter delivery. One thing led to another, and soon he was processing automatic renewals. Now he had a small though lucrative business lending money against future Social Security checks.

Some things hadn’t changed, though. Customer cars still stopped on the street to deal at his corner, and the neighborhood was still freaking dangerous. Especially now, when it looked like a turf war was heating up just a block over from his stand.

So when he recognized a battered, antiquated silver Edison all-electric car rolling to a stop beside him, his first words were, “Grandma Jenkins! You shouldn’t be here. It’s too dangerous.” He looked around a little wildly; fortunately, it didn’t look like violence was about to break out in the next two minutes. “I just shipped you your monthly order of hydrocodone last week. Did something go wrong?”

The little old lady shook her head. Small, tight curls of silver hair waved in the sunlight. “Got it right on time. But I’m here for a special order.” She looked around, eyes wide, as if afraid of being overheard. “We’re not on any government vidcams here, are we?”

Trey snorted. “Not a chance, Grandma.” The street dealers generally took Monday off, since that was the day the government came around and repaired/replaced all the vidcams. Tuesday morning the younger children practiced their baseball skills by using both their pitching and their batting abilities to knock the vidcams back out.

Grandma Jenkins spoke in quiet desperation. “I need the BrainTrust vaccine for Blue Rubola. You happen to have any? Or know someone who might? I need the real thing, Trey, absolutely no substitutes.”

Well, Trey understood both her caution and her urgency. Trading in the rubola vaccine was a serious offense. Both the Feds and the California government were hot to stop it.

Trey was, of course, one of the first entrepreneurs to take on the forbidden product. BrainTrust wholesale prices were surprisingly low, probably because of their level of automation, so there was room for fat margins in the distribution chain.

He nodded to the grand old lady. “My little brother has trained to make the injections, so he can fix you up right here. Or if you have experience with injections yourself, you can do it on your own.”

He rolled up the arm of his t-shirt and pointed to the meat of his shoulder. “And as for the quality of our product, it’s straight from the BrainTrust. See that kinda reddish blotch on my skin? It’s a characteristic of the real vaccine, and it lasts about a week. If you don’t get that, you didn’t get the real vaccine.” He rolled his sleeve down with a laugh. “The first person my brother practiced injecting was me. Disaster. But he got the hang of it pretty quickly. We’ve already inoculated everyone in my family, most of my friends’ families, and most of their friend’s families. Not a sign of Blue Rubola among any of them.” The old warning to drug dealers didn’t apply to Blue Rubola vaccine, Trey figured “do not use your own product” would be a mistake in this case. He doubted there was a single person in his ‘hood who hadn’t gotten vaccinated.

Trey changed the subject. “And I should mention that, although we can just sell you the vaccine if you prefer, we do offer the injection and the disposal of the needle as a free service to our regular customers.”

Grandma Jenkins frowned. “I don’t want just one, Trey. I need enough for my whole family, and their friends.”

Trey gave it a moment’s thought. “I can give you a great deal on a whole carton. Fourteen hundred doses in dry packets; you just need to follow the instructions and mix with distilled water before injecting.” He quoted a price. “You want that much?”

Grandma Jenkins pondered this for a moment, nodded. “That’s enough to vaccinate both the whole high school and the elementary school where my grandkids are. I hadn’t planned on that, but I think the PTA will reimburse me. Can I get it now?”

Trey tapped out a message to his brother. “Sure can, Grandma. I’ll put it on your account.”

“You’re a good young man. Thank you.”

Before she rolled up the window, Trey made one last urgent point. “And if you need more, don’t come back down here, you hear me? Message me saying how many blue candies you want, and I’ll send it by copter just like always. I don’t want you getting hurt just to see me.”

Grandma Jenkins smiled, waved, and drove down the street to Trey’s younger brother.

Trey stood a little straighter as he watched her depart. He always enjoyed giving good service to his best customers.

Oziegbe stepped off the BrainTrust ferry onto the rocky shore many miles south of Ensenada in Baja California, the Mexican peninsula south of San Diego. Dozens of people and hundreds of bots followed him.

What an odd place this was. He’d experienced this kind of heat before, but nothing this dry. Ciara had warned him to drink even when not thirsty while thrusting into his hands a huge water bottle imprinted with the words, Welcome to the BrainTrust.

Colin—an interesting person, that one—had pressed a tube of lip balm on him. “You’ll get chapped lips, something you’ve probably never experienced before.” Colin had shown him how to use the lip balm because he was right—Oziegbe had no idea what he was talking about.

As the first ferry pulled away, the second one slid into place. The bots scurried to haul out the most important items. First of all were the beta batteries, which had to be set up before the bots were all drained of power.

Second were a number of crates of Blue Rubola vaccine.

Colin and the BrainTrust had, Oziegbe knew, paid a remarkable number of bribes to get the permissions to build here so quickly. As Colin had explained it, the bribes came in two forms: cash was, of course, popular with the government in Mexico City, but there was something even more valuable than cash: the ability to ensure that one’s family would survive the plague.

At first, the Mexican government had been uninterested in the vaccine. They figured it was an American problem, no matter how patiently the BrainTrusters tried to explain that viruses knew no borders. Mexico would be a hotter plague zone than America all too soon, particularly Mexico City, with its frighteningly dense, shockingly poor slums where proper nutrition was a dream. “No big deal,” the politicians had muttered, “The Wall will protect us from the Americans.”

Their attitude had undergone a radical revision after the plague had broken out in Puerto Peñasco, a coastal city that had been transformed, decades earlier, into a giant retirement home for Americans on Social Security.

As Blue Rubola spread from that minor local extension of the Yankee empire, the politicians’ attitudes had experienced such a remarkable change that soon the clink of SmartCoin was considerably less interesting than the availability of hypodermic syringes filled with pale-blue survival.

The limited amount of SmartCoin needed to seal the deal by that time had already been transferred to the politicians in the capital. They would get their doses of vaccine the moment the factory went online.

The crates of vaccine now offloaded from the ferry were bribes for another key market segment: the local residents in the nearby towns. Ensenada would, if things proceeded according to plan, be immune to the virus within the week.

The first things Oziegbe had to do included vaccinating all the locals, hiring some of those locals, bringing in more BrainTrust bots, getting more locals through basic training with the Accel modules Ciara and Lenora had lured several of their module authors into whipping together, ordering materials to be brought by truck down Route 1 through Ensenada, building a road spur from the factory location to Route 1 in time for the trucks, and getting a helluva lot more bots on site.

Then he had to order all the stuff they hadn’t thought of yet that they were going to need in time for it to arrive before they needed it. It was a management nightmare.

Oziegbe rubbed his hands together. “This is going to be great!” he exclaimed to the hot wind that blew through the crisp blue sky above him.

The leader of the epidemiology team stood in front of the auditorium, briefing everyone on the race between the spread of the virus and the spread of the vaccine. “So, as you can see, we’re starting to win. Now, that’s a lot different from actually winning; it could take years to bring this epidemic to a conclusion since it went international virtually the first day of its release. Some of the PEZ-like dispensers were found in international airports, and they were very effective.”

The epidemiologist took a sip of water. “But we’ve started shipping stocks of vaccine to all the major cities of the world. If an outbreak occurs, almost every nation has agreed to break their regulations, based on our experiences with the United States, and inoculate the at-risk populations.”

Dash raised her hand. “This is all wonderful news, but I can’t help noticing an anomaly in your numbers.” She synced her tablet to the wallscreen and drew lines around several clusters of data. “Am I confused, or did the Blue Rubola hardly affect the people in these impoverished areas? I think you call them ‘ghettos?’ If so, what was the special characteristic that protected them? Wouldn’t we normally expect these densely populated, low-income neighborhoods to suffer disproportionately more, not less?”

The epidemiologist chuckled. “Good catch, Dash. This is indeed a bizarre anomaly, quite the opposite of what we’d normally predict. We’re analyzing the phenomenon with all the resources we can afford.” He shrugged. “Our best guess at this time is there’s something special about their diet that confers a limited immunity, but that’s only a hypothesis.”

As he shut off the wallscreen, he made a promise. “I’ll let you know when we have something concrete. If we ever have something concrete. Sometimes these things just remain a mystery.”