Authors: K.M. Malloy
Aire sprinted towards the tub
, but her shoes slipped on the wet tile and she came crashing down backwards, sending a silencing stab of pain through her body as she landed on her tailbone. She got to her knees, the pain in her backside burning as she crawled on all fours towards the tub
and yanked her mother’s head back. She took in a gasp of air and coughed up the soapy liquid beginning to pool in her lungs.
“Mom, what are you doing?”
The woman caught her breath and returned staring at the water. “It’s sad,” she whispered.
“What’s sad?”
Her mother didn’t reply.
She turned off the water and sat panting with her legs curled under her, careful to avoid putting weight on her bruised tailbone. Tears slipped silent down her face as she stared at her mother.
Doc had better be right…he better be…
Aire finished her mother’s bath, dressed her in a clean nightgown, and propped her in a chair next to the bed. She felt her mother’s blank stare on her as she finished putting on the fresh sheets. Placing her back under the blankets, Aire handed her the vitamin and glass of water. The woman swallowed it with unblinking eyes.
“If you need anything, just yell. I’ll be back in a little bit to bring you some food, okay?”
No answer. Aire took the glass and placed it next to the bed. She stroked her mother’s clean hair and adjusted the blankets before leaving.
In the quiet of her room, she cried
loud, sobbing cries that clenched at her stomach muscles
before going downstairs to heat up some soup.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Wednesday May 5, 2010
8:37 a.m.
Population: 217
The school sat quiet and somber. Aire looked around at what had once been her history class of thirty that was now a class of twelve. So many were gone. Vanished. She doodled absentmindedly in her notebook, her mind racing with questions. Why did it seem that hardly anyone was troubled by the madness plaguing the town? Why was no one else looking for an answer? Why was the mayor still doing nothing about it?
What if Doc wasn’t right about her mother?
A sigh escaped her lips as
she dropped her pen
and
looked down at her notebook. A dark man smiled back at her, a floating rice grain above his palm. Behind him was the face of the lion. She balled up the paper and placed it on the edge of her desk. The African’s warning haunted her in the sunlight as well as in slumber.
Beware the blue lion.
***
Central Control
Lab wing
General Manning stormed past the security center to the med lab
where h
alf a dozen units were beginning to stir from behind the Plexiglas.
“Where the hell is Dr. Patel?”
Several research physicians turned to see where the bellowing command had come from. A tall Asian frowned at the general before going to meet him.
“General, if you could refrain from barking orders at me and my staff I’d really appreciate it,” the Asian said as he glared down at Manning.
“Patel,” Manning growled, doing his best not to tilt his chin to look up at the doctor. “I need updates and I need them now. Our investors will pull the plug if they find out the place has turned into a mad house and you know damn well we can’t afford that with the budget crisis. We’re already operating on a skeleton crew as it is. We can’t even afford a security surveillance team anymore for Christ’s sake. My team has taken care of the damn kid in Manhattan who started this whole fucking circus, now what is your team going to do about
cleaning
up this mess?”
“Seems your team didn’t do much other than make that boy disappear.”
Manning glared at the neurologist, his beady eyes glowing under bushy eyebrows. “We did everything we could to make him tell us how to c
ure
the virus. We had a pile of his fingernails and teeth in a mason jar and he still wouldn’t talk, but at least we still got rid of him and all traces of our project. So I repeat, what is your team going to do about this?”
“Well, that depends,” Patel said, clutching his clipboard to his chest.
“
Depends on what?”
“
It depends
on what happens in the next few hours. If your tech guy can break the virus code, we can stage a health fair day, or whatever you want to call it. A few members of my team can go into
the
field and administer injections to the infected units to repress neurotransmitter production
long
enough for their chips to regain proper functioning again.”
“Okay,
” Manning nodded. “What if tech can’t crack the virus?”
“Then we won’t be able to do anything.”
“Can’t we just take their chips out and put new ones in?”
Patel laughed. “No. The units can’t function without their chips. Their chemical balances are driven solely by the chip’s hardware. If we took them out, we’d have the same situation we have now. They’ve never had to deal with their emotions on their own, and without a synthetic neurostimulator, they’d be unable to control themselves. Besides, it takes a team of six neurobiologists working sixty hours a week over eight months to produce a new chip, plus another three months of testing to ensure it functions correctly. The production costs are astronomical, and as you said
,
we don’t have the budget to produce over two hundred new chips.”
“Why the hell can’t we put the uninfected units in cryo until we crack this thing
?
” Manning said, his size six shoes clicking on the blue tile of the hall way. “We don’t have many left as it is, and the Blue Lion Group is anxious to begin testing phase three of the experiment.”
“Hmm.” Patel dropped his clipboard to his side. “We may be able to do that, but it would take time and additional resources to up the production levels.”
“Our investors have already given more than what they originally agreed to pay. What if tech can somehow reprogram the chips? You know, to level them out or something?”
“I’m sorry sir, we can’t do that.”
“Why the hell not? Isn’t the chip designed to tell their brains to level out their emotions before they start feeling anything too strongly? Level their neuro-whatevers so they don’t get uppity?”
“It’s much more complicated than that, but
in essence,
yes,” Patel said. “What’s happening now is, instead of the chip producing the chemical needed to counter balance an emotion, they’re producing more of whatever it is they’re feeling. And it’s based on individual design, not external stimulation.”
“Right, so why can’t we manually counter balance?”
“We tried that in some of the units,” Patel said, motioning to the lab room behind the Plexiglas. A woman lay on a table, half covered in a white sheet
. A silver dart with red tail feathers protruded
from her chest.
“What happened?”
“That one there,” Patel said, pointing to the woman on the table, “that one was attempt one hundred three. Every time we told the chip to counter what it was already telli
ng the brain
to produce, it went into overdrive. It started making even more neurotransmitters to increase whatever unbalanced emotion that person was already suffering from. Her
blood pressure
spiked
to 203 over 157 when we tried to implement serotonin to calm down her anger. She was one who came in for labor and delivery four weeks ago. We hadn’t even noticed the virus then, and it
still
got to her during the testing of the chip in her new infant. We ended up having to put her down after she tried to suffocate the infant during nursing, and that was when we had her sedated to the gills.”
“Jesus,” Manning said, rubbing his face with his palms. “The violent ones, are they capable of murder?”
The Asian pointed to a man that looked in his early sixties laying next to the woman. “See that one? He had a Border Collie for ten years that went everywhere with him
. Raised it from a puppy and do
ted on the thing like it was a grandchild from what our surveillance reports from Jenkins say. He beat that dog to death with his own hands. You couldn’t tell what the poor thing was when he finished with it.”
“Jesus.”
“I suggest you don’t watch the tape. Every one of your men that’s seen gruesome combat more than half their care
ers lost their stomachs over it.
”
Manning shook his head, his thin lips pursing together. “So our only option is to destroy all of the existing G-157
chips and start over?
”
“Correct
.”
“What about the children in the current population? How many do we still have?”
“Around seventy or so minors are still left.”
“Can we use them for the next phase of testing?”
Patel shook his head. “The G-157 has to be installed in infancy. The original G-47 chips we started with in the sixties were implanted on adults with a five percent success rate. We could try putting the three infants we haven’t released into the population in cryo, but it’s highly unlikely they’ll survive. The units need to be at least twelve years or older to be put into cryosleep. It would make more financial sense to destroy the current infants we have rather than putting them under. And with the development of the G-175 chip, it would again make more sense to destroy all existing
G-157
units and purchase new ones rather than try to salvage the old.”
“Alright,” Manning said quietly. “Keep the existing infants for now. I’ll arrange a meeting with the board to see what their decision is for all of this.”
Patel nodded and turned to go back to his lab. Manning looked at the old man behind the glass. He saw red speckles on the faded
flannel
shirt before a technician covered
the man
in a sheet to be wheeled down to the burner for disposal. “Jesus,” he whispered.
***
Jackson jumped when General Manning burst through his office door and slammed it shut, sending a small stack of papers whirling off his desk. He took a seat across from the software engineer, his strained and bloodshot eyes staring into Jackson’s.
“Well?”
Jackson took off his glasses to massage his nose. The pads had made a deep indent across the bridge of his nose from not being removed in nearly twenty four hours. “Well what?”
Calloused fists slammed on the pine desktop. “Don’t fuck with me
,
Jack. You know God damn well what I want to know.”
Sighing, Jackson replaced his glasses and straightened the picture of his daughter still resting next to his monitor. “Look, the kid who designed the thing was good. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”