Plague

CHAPTER 24

It was dark by the time Samantha arrived at Niche Café. It was small and cozy with a view of the beach outside. There were only a handful of people inside and most of them were locals having a final meal at the closest restaurant; a sign over the door letting everyone know that the café would be closed tomorrow morning at ten.

Duncan was sitting at a booth, sipping a fruity drink. He smiled and waved when he saw her. Wilson had been right; his face seemed to light up and Sam found it cute.

“How’d the meeting go?” he asked.

Sam sat down and ordered an ice water. “Depressing.”

“I’m not there yet. This isn’t the most virulent outbreak I’ve seen, but I haven’t seen a pathogen spread so quickly in the population. We’re lucky this is an island, so there’s that to be grateful for.”

“Do you always look on the bright side of everything?”

“That’s the only way to live. Whatever thoughts you put out into the universe, that’s exactly what the universe gives back to you. It’s like some magical genie granting your wishes. But it doesn’t know what’s a wish and what’s just random thought. You have to keep your thoughts positive.”

“If one of your loved ones was dying slowly in our cots, I don’t know how positive you’d be.”

“True. You can never really know until you test it. Luckily, or unluckily, depending on how you look at it, I have no loved ones.”

“No family?”

“No, I was adopted by an elderly Mormon couple when I was six. They had some siblings, an aunt somewhere, but no one else. When they passed, that was the end of my family.”

“Did you ever try to track down your biological parents?”

“Once, when I was in college. I met my dad actually. He was a trucker in Wyoming. I called and asked if I could come see him. He had a new family now and didn’t really want to but I had to see him. I had to see where my genes came from.”

“And what’d you find out?”

“That genes are overrated.” This made her smile. “What about you?” he said.

“I have a brother and two sisters. My brother’s a physician. One of my sisters is a stay at home mom and the other is a physicist. My mom lives in Atlanta.”

“What about your dad?”

“He passed away when I was in my twenties. He was a really successful entrepreneur. You remind me a little of him actually. He was really into the positive thinking and self-help movements.”

“Sounds like a smart guy. How do you think he would feel about you chasing down the worst diseases in the world for a living?”

“I think he’d be worried about me but he’d understand the odds. Death due to exposure to pathogens is nearly unheard of for CDC employees. We’re very careful.”

The waitress came and took their order; Sam ordered a pulled pork sandwich and Duncan had chicken nachos.

“Did you see the report by Pushkin?” Duncan asked.

“No? What’d it say?”

“It was just released a few hours ago. He’s termed the pathogen Agent X. Essentially, the report found that the cultures he developed resemble smallpox and Ebola, but are a distinct entity.”

“An unknown hot agent,” she said as she absently played with the straw in her water. “I knew they existed, but I never thought I’d be in the middle of an outbreak for one.”

“There’s a section of USAMRIID’s labs devoted to unknown hot agents.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Most people don’t. You need top secret clearance just to go in there. See what happens is American-well, don’t really know what to call them-corpses I guess, are shipped to USAMRIID after death when a hot agent is suspected. These are usually CIA operatives, FBI agents on special assignment, military intelligence, people like that. We never learn their identities or even where they picked up the pathogen. We don’t know anything about them other than they’re a body on our slab.

“If we find a hot agent after autopsy and analysis of blood and tissues, and it turns out to be unidentifiable, it’s stored in the unknown agents lab. We have over a hundred unknown agents in there. I’d kill to find out where they came from. We added one several months ago that caused the brain to lose consistency. Didn’t affect any other part of the body. The brain would just melt. It came from the corpse of a woman, but of course that’s all I know about her. It’s fascinating how many ways nature can dream up to kill us.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want us here. We are the only species that actively destroys her. This could be her way of fighting back,” she said.

“We’re her children like anything else. She doesn’t strike me as the type to destroy her children.”

“I disagree. Look at extinction. Ninety-nine point nine percent of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. Extinction is the norm on our planet, not longevity. It’s that change that allows a new species to rise, have their moment in the sun, and then fade away. It’s required somehow, but from our perspective, we’re infinite. Like we have to exist forever. It’s just not the case.”

“We’re the most intelligent beings that have ever existed, though. If anyone can find that longevity it’s us.”

“There’s actually some argument to be made that intelligence is counter-evolutionary. It gives us the ability to destroy ourselves at a speed that nature never could. Just look at nuclear weapons. Every time one is ignited there’s a small probability the nitrogen in the atmosphere will ignite and burn away all the oxygen. Yet we’ve still taken that risk over and over again. Eventually, we won’t pull our lucky card.”

“You know, I think if you want to believe we’re helpless cogs in the wheels of nature, then that’s how you’ll see the world. But if you believe we’re luminous beings put on this earth for a purpose, then that’s how the universe will appear to you.”

“You’re religious, aren’t you?”

“Mormon, like my parents.”

“You don’t find it odd that almost all children happen to end up the same religion as their parents but claim they’ve independently reached the conclusion that their religion is the correct one?”

“Ouch. Going right for the jugular.”

“Oh, wow, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you. I just meant-”

“No, I’m totally kidding. It’s fine. Well what if children were meant to be part of that faith and that’s why they were born into it? But we don’t need to talk about that. The French say you should never discuss religion or politics at the dinner table because you’ll ruin your appetite.”

She grinned. “Have you been to France?”

“Yeah, several times.”

“I’ve always wanted to go.”

“Well, maybe I can take you some time.”

She smiled and, for the first time since she’d been around him, thought she felt herself blush.

They finished dinner and stayed at the restaurant for over two hours talking, until the wait staff told them they would be closing up for the night. They headed outside and the moon was bright in a cloudless sky. They decided to walk around the block.

Few people were out on the streets and Sam found the quiet peaceful. It was odd how used one could get to the most aggravating sounds: construction, sirens, car horns, shouting…a city was filled with so much noise that it seemed our brains had to go into a trance simply to shut out all the sound so we could function.

They talked about their lives growing up, about why they chose science as the field they wanted to dedicate their lives to. Their reasons were polar opposite: Duncan thought that science, as shown through the recent developments in quantum mechanics and quantum cosmology, ultimately led to God. He believed God had given us the chance to probe his creation and discover secrets that would make our lives better.

Samantha had gone into science because without God, she felt the universe was a cold and lonely place. Science brought order to that loneliness. The fact that the third law of thermodynamics worked on earth the same as it worked on an alien planet a hundred million light years away was comforting. Science showed her that at the core of the chaos was stability.

They came back to where her bike was parked and talked a few more minutes. Duncan came in for a kiss when they heard a man speaking to them. Sam looked over and saw a homeless man sitting with his back against the restaurant’s exterior.

“What was that?” she asked him.

“Can you spare some change?”

He began to cough. It sounded wet and he spit a glob of black fluid onto the pavement.