Chrysalis

48

Logan had dragged the chair from the workstation in his suite and pulled it to the window. Now he sat with his feet on the sill, one ankle crossed over the other. The tablet he’d been scrolling rapidly through for the last fifteen minutes lay on the floor beside him; Grace, whom he’d kept busy conflating data and searching for needles in haystacks, had fallen silent.

He knew time was running short, but what Purchase had told him — and more critically, what Purchase surmised — convinced Logan he needed to step away from the madness and stitch these fragments of information together: lab notes, confidential files, journal entries intended for deletion, data disguised as innocuous that was, in fact, anything but. What he hadn’t already learned, he absorbed as quickly as possible, Grace assisting by keeping to the most promising data nodes. Now he had to do what Grace could not help him with: put the disparate elements into a narrative… or, at least, the ghost of one.

He leaned back and closed his eyes, steadying his breathing. Grace had asked if he was planning to tell a bedtime story — and that seemed as good a description as any. Except this one was not likely to lull anybody to sleep. Clearing his mind, he sorted the myriad elements as best he could. And from those, he started to spin the tale.

Wing Kaupei — no doubt that was not her birthname — had worked at Carewell for six years. Despite how thoroughly Chrysalis vetted those it hired, no details of her CV could be trusted. But from her work, it was clear the knowledge she claimed — molecular biology, with a subspecialty of paleopathology — was in fact one area of her expertise.

It seemed likely she was also skilled at corporate espionage and social engineering, and from time to time took on assignments from an unknown but well-paying entity, perhaps even a nation-state.

Eight months earlier, Wing and Randall Pike had gone on an expedition to Alaska, in search of organic samples useful for pharmaceutical development. Pike had taken the trip before, but this time was different: ground-penetrating radar had previously picked up what appeared to be a Neanderthal gravesite embedded deep in the ice. Pike was a biologist specializing in epidemiology, and if in fact there was a mass grave, perhaps some useful information about ancient immune systems could be gleaned from it.

The expedition was successful beyond his wildest hopes, as Pike confided in a journal Wing had later deleted… only to be recently coughed back up, like a chicken bone, by the malfunctioning Helix. Not only did the cores find a mass grave, some thirty thousand years old — but they revealed tantalizing evidence of an unknown pathogen that had killed every last creature. As Pike studied the samples in his tent at night, he grew increasingly convinced this pathogen might not only have killed the Neanderthals in the mass grave… but it also could have been responsible for their die-off on a continental scale. A far cry from the conventional theory that interspecies hanky-panky — with Homo sapiens Y chromosomes eventually replacing original Neanderthal DNA — helped speed them into oblivion.

If Neanderthals had fallen victim to this pathogen, rather than going extinct through genetics and Darwinian evolution, it would not only be a breakthrough discovery — but it could benefit medicine as well, because all evidence pointed to the pathogen not affecting Homo sapiens. Pike was so excited he broke radio silence once, to imply they’d found something important.

Then, on the day of their planned return to civilization, a terrible tragedy: Pike accidentally fell into a crevasse, his body unrecoverable. Wing returned to her office in the Torus and analyzed the ice cores, only to find that — after further study with more sophisticated instruments — Pike’s initial excitement was misplaced: the samples were valueless. A few weeks later, there was an electrical fire in the freezer compartment that held the cores, and Wing — her promising project literally up in smoke — was reassigned to a managerial job liaising with BioCertain.

This, at least, was what the record stated — along with Pike’s diary, which was never supposed to be seen. But based on the data fragments Dr. Purchase had recovered, which revealed that a single core sample had survived the fire and been moved to another Carewell subdivision — DNA Synthetics — a very different story began to take shape.

Wing confirmed that Pike’s discovery — which he’d been correct about — would be a tremendous coup for Carewell. She also had corporate and government contacts outside Chrysalis that would be very interested in possessing it — and would pay handsomely.

The most profitable endgame for a discovery like this would be a biological weapon.

Disguising her work and concealing her trail, Wing analyzed the remaining core sample, which she’d kept hidden away after the fire, and within a few weeks managed to isolate the pathogen so deadly to Neanderthals. It was a novel pathogen, with the zero transmissibility of a prion disease, yet following the familiar pattern of infection and DNA replication: a biologic whose effect was a cytokine “storm” interrupting normal action of the immune system. It acted quickly, almost as quickly as a poison — and it seemed invariably fatal.

The saving grace of this pathogen — which had perhaps led to the Neanderthals’ extinction — was it had no effect on Homo sapiens. But Wing had the expertise to change that.

Scraps of metadata and header files, repurposed to look like innocuous lab work, showed that Wing succeeded in tweaking the pathogen to successfully infect humans. Apparently, it was startlingly easy. The two tests she ran — one “subject” a person in elder care, the other working in a sheet metal factory — showed the pathogen killed by causing the immune system to abruptly go into overdrive, dumping large amounts of enzymes into the nervous system that invariably caused fatal interactions with beneficial pharmaceuticals already present in the bloodstream. It was as if the immune system began to see these medications as a threat — but its response doomed the host body instead of saving it.

Logan opened his eyes. Here, the trail went cold. The PCR replication log that Purchase had stumbled across implied Wing had synthesized some of this weaponized compound. But given the danger of being caught, it seemed she’d performed the synthesis only once, after which she erased or corrupted all data related to the work: dutifully flagged as deleted by the Helix and now unintentionally, imperfectly, resurrected.

Wing’s work had been remarkably dangerous and highly illegal. Logan wondered, could it be effectively marketed as a bioweapon? Its method of action, after all, was effectively like a poison: one victim at a time.

With one difference: this pathogen made it appear as though the infected person had died as a result of his or her own defective immune system. Spearman’s sudden fatal attack; Janelle Deston’s inexplicable car crash.

But what happened next? The tattered pieces of evidence did not explain.

Logan closed his eyes again.

Wing’s handlers debated what to do with this sudden, sinister gift. Synthesizing additional doses would be difficult — and besides, governments to which one might sell such a poisonous compound probably had their own already. There was, however, one unique convergence Wing’s handlers might exploit. Chrysalis was about to release a new product: the Omega II Voyager. How it worked was cloaked in corporate and technological secrecy. It was an audacious, game-changing, brilliant invention… but, like all paradigm shifts, would have to instill confidence, overcome consumer distrust.

If Wing’s pathogen could somehow leverage Omega’s mission-critical rollout, then it could best be weaponized as blackmail. If they planned carefully, salted the ground, then acted when Voyager was at its most vulnerable point of no return — and at the same time, manipulated all evidence to point to Omega itself as the culprit behind the mysterious deaths… then Wing’s handlers would be in a position to extort an unprecedented amount of money from Chrysalis, in a great hurry, before vanishing from the scene and leaving wreckage and confusion behind them.

The scenario formed in Logan’s head and he quickly ran through several others, rejecting them all. Every piece of data pointed toward this: the very things Wing had tried to delete or conceal, ironically, made her true intentions more obvious.

But there was still a significant problem: logistics. Wing could not have done this alone. Even if there were well-funded handlers on the outside, she’d need people inside the Torus to help with the implementation. Somebody in BioCertain would have needed access to the links maintained 24/7 with all smart implants to — somehow — kill board members Spearman and Bridger; poison Marceline; and then sacrifice Janelle Deston, all at precisely planned moments — and then — once again, somehow — be ready to kill a thousand more, all as a way of convincing and misleading Chrysalis.

“Jeremy,” Grace said. “There’s a priority—”

But even as the synthetic voice spoke, it was overridden by another: also female, this one human.

“Dr. Logan?” the accent was vaguely Middle Eastern. “Jeremy Logan?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Dafna. Security specialist, liaison to Orris Peyton.”

Despite its brittle tension, the voice was rational and authoritative. In the background, however, Logan heard a confused turmoil of shouting and what sounded like a Klaxon.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Security headquarters. We were interviewing Benjamin Cardiff. Then we came under assault by an infiltrator.”

“Assault? How?”

“Disguised as a guard — machine-gun fire. He killed Cardiff, killed Kramer. Ms. Asperton is dead, four or five others. We wounded him and he had to retreat.”

My God… all dead? Claire, too? “And Peyton?”

“Shot. Unconscious now. But last thing he told me, told me twice, was: Call Logan.”