The Digital Plague (10 page)

“That,” Jabali muttered next to me, “is fucked up.”

“They spread, Mr. Cates. Any human comes within about eight feet of someone infected with these, and they make the leap, through the air. They will hitch a ride on bodily excretions, the usual viral or bacterial vectors, and once a single microscopic unit enters the body, it begins replicating. Once there are enough units in the body, they begin … consuming.” He turned back to us. I looked up at him, and he was smiling a terrible, cadaverous smile. He was a handsome man, his face finely etched, but he looked like a corpse taunting me. “They literally eat you from the inside out.”

I thought of blue-black bruises that eventually burst.

“Someone
built
these?” I said, my voice a dry rasp. “Someone purposefully
built
these?”

Terries nodded. “Yes. Generally speaking, the infected are dead within a day or two, depending on their general health to begin with, size and mass, some other factors we haven’t quantified yet.” He shrugged. “It’s spreading. We’re taking steps, but …” He looked at me. “How many people did you pass on your way up here, Mr. Cates? A hundred? Two hundred?” He shook his head. “You’ve killed us.”

Avery Cates,
I thought,
Destroyer of Worlds.

“Wait a second,” Jabali said. “Killed
us?
As in,
me?
”

Terries nodded. “All of us.”

I’d smelled a turning tide too many times before to ignore the obvious signs, so I reached across myself and drew my Roon, holding it pointed down at the floor but in plain sight. “Wait,” I said. “Terries, why am I still alive?”

He blinked at me. “What?”

I was gripping the automatic so tightly my palm hurt. “Everyone I’ve been in contact with over the last few days is now dead. These things kill within days. I’ve seen people dead on the street, for fuck’s sake.” I remembered that peculiar feeling of well-being, on my knees, blindfolded but suddenly not worried about it, and that ruined voice saying
and don’t worry: When it is over, you will be punished again.
“Why am I alive?”

Terries squinted at me for a moment and then transformed, life flowing back into his face. He threw up both hands. “Do not shoot!” he said, and turned away, running deeper into the lab.

A flash of panic ripped through me, and I brought the gun up, trying to keep Jabali in sight as I walked slowly around to follow. “Doc, don’t fucking
do
that. Doc?” I met Jabali’s eyes and paused. “You feel sick?” I said.

He stared back for a moment, and then swallowed. “Nah, boss. Guess I don’t.”

I nodded. “If you’re thinking of shooting me in the back, Jabali, at least wait to feel something first, okay?”

He stared at me for a few moments more and then nodded, putting up his hands. “All right, boss. All right.”

I nodded and turned away to follow Terries, but he was already striding back to me, holding a battered metal bin in both hands. “Roll up your sleeve, Mr. Cates,” he panted, sounding suddenly excited.

“What?”

He slammed the bin down on the desk, making his video screens jump. One shut off with a pop. “Roll up your goddamn
sleeve,
Mr. Cates,” he said, holding up a huge autohypo. “You’re right: You are not sick. Let’s find out
why.
”

Day Five:
A Cloud of Death
Around me

Needled by my instincts, which screamed out against exposing a vein to Dr. Terries, I sat with my naked arm outstretched. “If you cut me,” I said conversationally, “I will hurt you. Just so we’re clear.”

From across the small table he’d unfolded in the middle of the lab, Terries nodded. “I understand, Mr. Cates. Believe me, I understand perfectly what someone like you is capable of.”

With one hand already holding me by the wrist, he reached forward with the autohypo. I intercepted his arm with my free hand, clamping tightly around his forearm, probably causing him pain. He looked up at me with alarm.

“Are you implying I’m an animal again, Dr. Terries?”

His face registered several emotions, one after the other. I could have labeled them finely—the specific intensity of terror, the flavor of impotent rage, the flowchart of quick scheming—but I didn’t bother. I’d made my point, and he put a rotten smile on his face and shook his head.

“Not at all, Mr. Cates!” he said quickly, making no move to free himself. He was sweating lightly. “I meant that with all respect. I am not a …” He paused to search for the perfect way to compliment me without seeming to kiss my ass. His face brightened pathetically. “I am not a
man of action,
yes? That is all I meant.”

I gave him a grin, slight and humorless, and let go of his arm. I turned to Jabali. “Get that? We’re
men of action.
”

Jabali looked like he didn’t have any fucking clue what was going on, but he smiled anyway. “Shit, boss.”

I was playing the role to the hilt because it was what Dr. Terries expected. From the moment I’d appeared behind him on the street, he’d pegged me as the typical downtown hooligan the Vids always portrayed: ignorant, violent, and greedy. And maybe I was, depending on the day, but for now it was just a way to keep Dr. Terries terrified, because if he suspected even for a moment that we didn’t mean to kill him, he’d be impossible to deal with.

He swallowed and took a deep breath, putting his eyes on my inflated vein. Expertly, he jabbed the autohypo forward and I felt it pinch my skin, the pain melting away a second later as an automatic painkiller was administered. The clear chamber began to slowly fill with my blood, deep red.

“I’ve seen parts of your file,” Terries said suddenly, glancing up at me and licking his lips. “Some of it is in the clear—not censored by Marin’s office, I mean—and it makes for interesting reading.”

I weighed whether or not to find this offensive and decided to let it pass without comment. It was good to be unpredictable. Kept the rubes terrified; people liked to learn the rules, because once you knew the rules you could manipulate the outcome. If there
were
no rules, it was best to keep your fucking arms and legs inside the safety cage.

“Did you really, uh, did you really interact with Dennis Squalor?” he went on, watching the autohypo do its work.

I nodded, keeping my face blank. I didn’t like to think of the hours I’d spent under Westminster Abbey, hunting Squalor, killing Monks, and watching Kev Gatz die.

He waited another moment. “It’s very exciting,” he finally said, removing the autohypo cleanly and holding a small piece of gauze in place over the wound. “Squalor was a genius in his way. Did amazing work in cybernetics and Biological Systems Replacement. Would have won awards, had professorships, if … well,” he smiled nervously, keeping his eyes down on the autohypo, “if he hadn’t gone mad.”

“You mean, if he hadn’t tried to murder everyone and turn them into fucking Monks?”

He carried the autohypo over to a bank of equipment across the room, shadowed by a jumpy Jabali. “Well, of course … still, his accomplishments …”

“Would you like a lock of his hair, Doc? Get on with it.”

“Very well, very well,” he muttered, inserting the autohypo into a slot and ramming it home. A soft tone rang out and a small screen lit up, text streaming from top to bottom. Terries crouched down and stared at it. “You don’t have a very healthy diet, Mr. Cates,” he muttered absently. “And I would be concerned about your liver function if I were your physician. There—I can see the signatures of the nanobots. Yours are different, however; it’s not entirely clear where the deviation is …”

His muttering died down to a whisper, and then he was gesturing at his equipment, his thin lips moving but making no sound. I lifted the gauze off my arm and peered under it experimentally, then tossed it onto the floor and began rolling my sleeve down.

“I’ve spent quite a bit of time working with this material remotely,” Terries said suddenly. “Amazing tech. Far beyond anything I’ve seen anywhere else. Whoever developed this was a genius. So I’m familiar, you see, with the basic design. I can see where the examples in your blood deviate from the structures we’ve already cataloged, but it isn’t clear why. Wait, there’s a signal being emitted.” He spun around on his stool to face me. “
Your
nanobots are
broadcasting.
” He spun around again. “Two signals, actually. One is broad low power, one is narrow-beamed low power.”

I took a deep breath. Techies. I hated working with them.

“I could do much better and faster work if I had more resources, Mr. Cates,” he said suddenly, squinting at the screen. “I realize you do not trust me, thus your goon with the menacing air, but if I were in the Department’s lab, we would—”

“You’re doing fine, Doc,” I said. I had no desire to get any closer to Cop Central.

“Very well. Perhaps I could at least call in some colleagues, trustworthy sorts—”

“Afraid not.”

He worked in silence for a few moments. “Wait a second,” he murmured, leaning forward. “Some of this is in cleartext …”

I stood up and walked over to him, squinting down at the equipment. “What is?”

“The narrow-beam signal,” he said absently. “Looks like this is freelance work, and the technician signed his name in a signal that is beamed back to an originating point. Unbelievable arro—”

He went very still. It was the sort of stillness that brought all my instincts up, sniffing the air for a threat. “Well, I’ll be
fucked,
” he said in a conversational tone.

“Doc?”

He glanced up at me as if remembering I was there. He stared at me and then started to laugh, shaking his head and waving at the equipment. “Mr. Cates, I didn’t realize you were Patient Fucking Zero. Is there anything left in that bottle?”

I looked back at the table and the bottle of gin I’d left there. “Sure,” I said. “What’s going on?”

He stood up and grinned around at me and Jabali, who glanced at his gun. I shook my head slightly, watching the good doctor walk unsteadily toward the table and pick up the bottle. He tipped it back and drank steadily for a few swallows, then put the bottle unsteadily back onto the table.

“Your nanobots are different, Mr. Cates. They are the
originators.
The builders. They do not attack your body, they simply build drones that are excreted through your pores to seek out hosts to infect. They are broadcasting a weak suppression field which keeps the drones dormant until they have exited your body, otherwise you would already be dead. If you died too soon, you might not infect enough people to achieve the tipping point, so the suppression field guaranteed that you would wander around for days, infecting as you went. Since the field actually has a range of a few feet—perhaps ten, at most—it also means that anyone near you for any length of time sees their own infection go dormant.”

He started walking past the table, turning to look at me over his shoulder, smiling, grandfatherly. He was probably only five or ten years older than me. “You’re the only reason I haven’t started dying yet, Mr. Cates.” He turned away and kept walking, gesturing blindly back toward Jabali. “Him, too! But if you move out of range, the nanobots inside me stop receiving the field and
wake up
—and start work.”

I should have been paying attention to the older man, but my mind had gone blank. I pictured myself walking through the city, inches from people. Standing next to Gleason, next to Wa, shaking Pick’s hand. Pick, who’d lived forever and might have lived another eternity, until I’d come along. I saw Glee, grinning at me.
Ooh, Avery’s a father figure.
I swallowed something thick that had lodged in my throat. “You said,” I managed to croak, “you said something about a second signal?”

I imagined a cloud of death around me.

“Yes!” Terries shouted from the other end of the lab, where he was rooting around in a cart of discarded equipment, cables, and mysterious black boxes. “It looks like a beacon signal, pinging a location in Europe, probably Paris by the looks of the EIP address, but I’d have to dig a little deeper to confirm that. I don’t know what it could be for. We saw that in the other nanobots, the regular ones that all the victims to date have had. Same name embedded in it, too.”

I nodded absently, my mind a second or two behind each word, trying to catch up. It was as if I was translating each word as I heard it, looking them up one at a time, everything coming to me in slow, lazy waves. Then I focused, staring at the doctor’s back. “A name?”

“In cleartext no less! Taking credit for the work.” He paused and looked over his shoulder at us, smiling, his teeth white and straight and perfect. “Taking credit for killing us all.”

From outside and above us, there was a burst of deep, pounding static, and then a mellow, golden tone, the sound of all the Vid screens clearing their throats. Normally silent, with text crawls, all the newer Vids were equipped for sound and erupted into booming stereo whenever there was an important announcement.

“
Attention,
” boomed a generic male voice, pleasant and controlled. It reminded me of the Monks. “
By Emergency Decree under Charter regulation Six-six-ten, the System Security Force has declared a state of general emergency. All citizens are requested to remain inside their homes until further notice. Noncompliance will be met with force. Attention: By Emergency Decree under Charter Regulation Six-six …”