Immortality (49 page)

Mark turned from his desk and looked up at the camera. His forehead was wrinkled. There were faint outlines of bags under his eyes.

“Are you there?” he asked.

“I’m here.”

“There’s something curious I want your opinion on.”

Her nerves prickled. She noticed his heart rate and oxygen level were rising. Mark took off the sweater vest and unbuttoned his shirt. Once he was stripped to the waist, he turned his shoulder to the camera and then peeled off the bandage.

“Notice anything odd?” he said.

“The bite marks are almost healed. That’s impossible.”

“I know… Any explanations?”

“None,” said Kathy shaking her head.

“I’ve thought about this,” said Mark. “We know the seeds can travel through living tissue by disassembling and reassembling it at the molecular level. What if the results of reassembly are better than new?”

“What?” said Kathy. She was incredulous. “You think this nanotech is healing your wounds, making a new and improved you?”

“Think about it. What if the seeds aren’t a weapon? You said it yourself that this technology could advance surgery by decades. What if it really is something that was designed to heal but has run amok? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a self-evolving program which has mutated into something that kills instead of cures. Maybe it’s like a drug with fatal side effects for most people.”

“You have no evidence. Have you checked for the presence of COBIC in those wounds?” asked Kathy.

“Already done,” said Mark. “The levels are zero, but that doesn’t mean COBIC wasn’t massing there an hour or even seconds before the test was done.”

“If it really was designed to heal instead of kill, wouldn’t we have seen a lot more evidence of that? I mean wouldn’t that be the dominant behavior?”

Carl walked into Kathy’s office. He had an odd expression on his face.

“We have a special delivery from the NSA,” said Carl. “Technicians have installed a black box on our network which hooks us directly into the NSA datacenter. They said the installation was ordered by General McKafferty. They have specific instructions to train us on using it before they leave.”

“What’s going on?” asked Mark.

“A new wrinkle,” said Kathy.

Mark rubbed his eyes. His vision was wavering. He’d been pushing too hard for too long. Text on the computer screen looked like it was wiggling and too bright. He willed himself to focus. The screen was displaying information from the NSA black box. The installation gave him a direct link into part of the mammoth NSA computer network, the part that monitored and processed lower frequency radio intercepts by satellites. The system had been recalibrated to process only those signals generated by seeds. Besides displaying real-time information, the program was able to go back in time and mine through a warehouse of raw data the NSA had collected. The system was able to trace and map, as well as display actual signal content. The results were revealing.

His computer screen was displaying a web of signal pathways that extended around the globe. The seeds had a wireless network of global coverage and intricate structure. Unlike long range radio signals, the seed transmissions only spanned a few feet. The signal was picked up by one seed and then relayed to one or more seeds farther down the road. This hand off, with its associated delays, allowed NSA systems to trace the routing of a single message packet, even though they hadn’t decoded the meaning of the data itself. Tracking of message packets down pathways that were reused again and again had led to reverse engineering of the wireless network’s layout. The pathways spanned land and sea in a spider web of continuous data flows. The network appeared to be adaptive and self-healing. The structure reminded Mark more of the vast complexity of interconnected neurons in a human brain than a man-made computer network. In his gut, he knew this was too advanced to be something humankind had engineered. He was starting to spook himself.

Beyond the intricacy of the network, the second thing that immediately stood out was the unique pattern of signals preceding, and then organizing, a kill zone. No one had an exact idea what the messages contained, but the same three types of coded messages were detected time and again at every kill zone; and from that repetition, a theory had emerged. Raw data that the NSA systems had recorded and saved months ago also showed the same pattern in the earliest kill zones. Replaying a recorded event showed one type of message which preceded every kill zone. NSA analysts theorized that this message ‘armed’ all the seeds within a geographic area. A second type of message was then received by one of the seeds that had been armed. The authors of the theory called the recipient of this message the ignition seed. Immediately upon receipt of an ignition message, the ignition seed broadcast a third type of message which was unquestionably a command to kill. This kill message was relayed out from the ignition seed in all directions, like a ripple in a pond. The distance that this message was relayed out from the ignition seed never exceeded fifty meters. From careful study of the signal’s data patterns, a discovery emerged that kill messages were relayed exactly fifty times. This meant the kill message had to contain some type of down-counter, which limited the size of zones by limiting the number of relays or ‘hops’ that the message could make. Limiting hops, relaying, message packets – all these things were the same networking mechanisms developed and used for the Internet. These similarities were very confusing and argued that seeds were man-made.

On the computer screen, the lethal area of a single kill zone was represented as a circular area tinted varying shades of red, with a bright pinpoint near the center to indicate the ignition point. Each zone was not an exact circle but was more of a circular blob. During larger kill zones, ignition messages “rained down” into a geographic area, with each small zone varying in shape, just as a collection of water drops on a flat surface would differ from one to another. Wherever an ignition message reached its recipient, people died, as if an invisible bomb had been dropped. The computer graphically illustrated the circular nature of small kill zones and how bigger zones were built from a cluster of these smaller zones or circles.

Mark was sinking into a dark depression as he stared at the same precursor signals replaying again and again. He was watching a recording of the Los Angeles horror. He’d realized how with a few changes this NSA system could be used to predict where a kill zone would hit and provide precious minutes of warning. He laid his head down on the desk and silently cried. How many lives could have been saved if they’d had this sooner? He couldn’t erase the faces from his mind – his little girl Mary or his wife Julie or Gracy. Even though the tragedy encompassed all of humanity, he was unable to feel anything beyond his personal loss and a hate that he could not direct at anything that would make a difference.

Mark lifted his head and stared back at the screen. Something occurred to him, something so obvious. He rubbed some remaining tears from his eyes. This network was too advanced, too intricate to have been deployed months or even years ago. This was something that had been here for a very long time. This network was old, really old. COBIC was an amazingly perfect transportation platform for seeds, but it was not able to move more than a few inches an hour without the aid of a current or some type of collaborative effort. Even considering air travel, with human hosts spreading the bacterium, the level of global saturation needed to support this wireless network was impossibly high. This communications spider web covered almost every square mile of earth and water. Since the radio signal had a range of only a few feet, this meant that small amounts of COBIC had to be present in almost every square yard of earth’s soil and water. It could easily take centuries for a normal bacterial infestation to reach this level of penetration. Maybe he and Gloria Martinez weren’t members of a very elite club after all. Was it possible a large percentage of all the people, animals, and crawling things were infected with at least a few of the bacteria? The tests for infected COBIC were good and getting better, but he knew the bug actively avoided detection; and the quantity he needed to detect to prove this theory was very small. That meant unless they were lucky or the subject was saturated, they would not see many positive test results from bodily fluids. They needed a better test. They needed something that seeds could not evade. Mark was certain a solution which exploited the seed’s communications network was possible. They could detect the radio waves from a few seeds: the NSA could do it with their spy satellites from a hundred miles up; handheld devices like the spectrum analyzer McKafferty had shown him could also detect the signals. What they lacked was a way to get the seeds to transmit on command, so they could be detected immediately – instead of waiting for a random signal to come along and reveal the presence of a seed acting as a relay.

~

“What is needed is a ping test,” said Dr. Marjari.

“Exactly,” chimed in Professor Karla Hunt.

Mark picked up the speaker phone and held it with both hands.

“Hey folks,” said Mark. “Translation, please! What the hell is a ping test?”

“Very, very easily defined,” said Dr. Marjari. “The ping test is something which computer technicians use to verify that network connections are working. The name comes from how sonar operates by sending out pings and waiting to hear echo-returns from the ping. In the case of sonar, a ping-echo being heard means something solid nearby has reflected the sound back. In the case of a network, a ping-echo returning means that the piece of equipment being pinged is connected to the network and working. When a device receives a ping message, it is programmed to echo the ping back to its source. When the source receives an echo from a ping it sent out, this verifies that the network and the device are operational.”

“So, what you are saying is that we need to come up with a ping signal for seeds,” said Mark.

“Very exactly,” said Dr. Marjari. “We need to construct a signal which the seeds are already programmed to relay or acknowledge with a response. Since we do not need to understand what the response actually signifies, and since we have access to a warehouse of stored NSA signal data, it should not be difficult to shift the data for signals which always elicit the same response. We could then test these signals by broadcasting them at a sample of infected bacteria until we find a signal which fits our needs.”

Mark was deeply troubled because he’d been released from isolation. Dr. Marjari had been right. Finding a ping signal had been simple. In less than six hours of NSA supercomputer time, Dr. Marjari had compiled a list of potential ping signals. It had then taken only a few minutes to program a handheld RF signal generator to play back and transmit each of the potential ping signals. A handheld spectrum analyzer was programmed to capture and measure possible seed responses. Add a little duct tape to wed the two devices together, plug in a pair of directional antennas, and the COBIC ping tester was born. The result was a clumsy looking, highly effective tool. The graph on the spectrum analyzer indicated echo signal strength. This level could then be directly translated into a rough measure of infestation. The first twenty ping signals from the NSA list had failed. The twenty-first had worked. The situation had rapidly changed for the worse within minutes after the first ping-tester began working.

Within one hour, Dr. Marjari had placed his entire IBM lab, including himself, under quarantine. The ping tester showed that everyone in the lab was infected. Some of the rooms themselves were clean but they were a distinct minority. At first they’d hoped something was wrong with the setup. Marjari himself ran a hundred blind tests on vials of infected and clean COBIC. The unfortunate results were that the ping tester was one hundred percent reliable. The lab facility became a disaster zone. Professional demeanor evaporated. Everyone in that rarified facility was now as fearful and panicked as the rest of the world had been for almost two months.

An hour later, Carl had purchased every usable handheld signal generator and spectrum analyzer that a local supply company had in stock; more were on order from other suppliers. He’d then had the devices couriered by military police to the BVMC Lab. Programming instructions for their specific equipment was e-mailed from Dr. Marjari as files that could be directly imported into the devices. The results at the BVMC Lab were a mirror of what had been found at Dr. Marjari’s IBM lab. The only areas not contaminated were three storerooms and the maximum containment lab. Mark was not surprised by these test results. The density of the seed’s wireless web could not have existed without a high level of infestation. His only surprise was that infestation of people appeared to be one hundred percent. He’d expected a lower number.

A few hours after the ping testers were deployed at the BVMC lab, Mark walked out of his isolation cell. There was no point in keeping him quarantined. The same tests they’d run at the BVMC lab were now being repeated as quickly as possible at sites around the world. Mark knew the results would be similar.

In his office, Mark picked up a ping tester for the first time. He turned it on and swept his office looking for hotspots. The device was highly directional. At close range it measured an oval area of approximately six inches in width. He was just satisfying his curiosity about the device more than performing any serious investigation. The floor read hotter than the walls or ceiling. An area behind the couch was especially hot. He suspected COBIC living in the guts of dust mites probably accounted for the hotter readings showing up in dusty areas of the room.

He stopped in front of the bathroom mirror and looked at himself for moment; then he decided to see if there was any pattern to the infestation of his body. His legs and arms gave off no response. His torso gave off no response. He wasn’t surprised. Without exception, everyone tested had little or no response except at the back of the skull, the brainstem. He moved the ping tester over his bite wound. There was a low level reading – not unexpected, but interesting. He pointed the detector at his forehead. White light flared in his eyes, blinding him. He dropped the ping tester. It clattered into the sink. The white light faded within seconds. He leaned on the bathroom mirror. His head was spinning. What had happened? He looked at the analyzer. There was no reading. The batteries had fallen out. He put the ping tester back together; then, steeled himself. He pointed the antenna at his forehead. He stared at his grim reflection in the mirror and switched it on. The same white light flared in his eyes. He quickly pointed it away. As the light faded, he was left with a mild sensation of nausea.