Public Enemy Zero

52

Restricted by the glass casing, Mitchell tried to turn his head to look at the man in the hazmat suit sitting just past his shoulders. It was hard enough to make out a face through the glass shield of the helmet without Mitchell’s own scared face reflecting back at him from inside the plastic dome that trapped him.

Mitchell could feel the van begin to move. He thought about shouting for help but knew no one would hear his muffled voice through the respirator and the van’s thick walls. The man in the hazmat suit slid across the metal bench so Mitchell could more clearly see him. The man looked out the small window at the rear of the van and then back toward him. He placed a gloved hand on Mitchell’s casket.

“Mitchell,” said the man’s voice from behind the ventilator in his mask. “I guess the only way to explain things is to just come right out and tell you.” The man paused. “When they get you to the facility, they’re going to find out that there’s nothing wrong with you.”

Nothing wrong with me? Was this guy crazy, thought Mitchell.

The man continued. “And then it’s going to be even worse for you. People will begin asking questions. Questions that others don’t want answered. And that’s why they want to kill you.”

Mitchell’s eyes bulged behind his own oxygen mask. Was this man an assassin? He ran his fingers along the edge of the container, trying to find some way to crack the seal and get out.

The man looked down at Mitchell struggling. He reached into a pouch and pulled something out and set it on top of the plastic casket. Mitchell’s eyes tried to focus on the object just inches above his head. It was a screwdriver.

“You’d need something like this to get yourself out. But I don’t suppose you have one on you. No matter.” The man leaned back and looked at a watch strapped to the outside of his suit. “We have a little time.”

Mitchell looked down at his feet. He braced his hands against the side of the container and began to kick. Maybe it wouldn’t set him free. At best it would attract the driver’s attention.

The man in the suit put another hand on the casket and shook his head as he looked down at Mitchell. “Mitchell, I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to help you.”

Mitchell stopped kicking and looked up at the man. “Who are you?”

“I’m part of this, Mitchell, but I never wanted to be a part of this.” He tapped the casket. “I’m a doctor. I’m part of a group that spends its time worrying about worst-case scenarios and trying to prevent them.”

“Like this?” asked Mitchell.

The man shook his head. “Much, much worse, Mitchell. This was a side effect. A mistake that happens when people act without thinking. When they do things out of fear. We’re at war Mitchell.”

Mitchell tried to look into the man’s eyes to read if he was being sincere or just trying to calm him down so he didn’t alert the driver. “At war with who?”

“The future, Mitchell. It has many faces, many threats. We take tiny pieces of information, and from those tiny pieces, we try to extract a bigger picture. Sometimes that picture is more horrible than you can imagine. When that happens, you have to act. You’re here because certain people decided to act in a certain way. I told them they were too motivated by fear. But it didn’t matter. What they saw was too terrifying to act any other way.”

Mitchell was silent as he tried to make sense of what the man was saying.

“A few months ago, we found something. A virus, basically a modified version of a pneumonia-causing virus, the kind of virus everybody has in their body but that their immune system keeps in check. But this virus had something special in it, a set of instructions that would flip a switch in your body that’s been dormant for a hundred million years.

“Ever wonder how animals can tell family members apart? It’s in the pheromones. Chemical fingerprints. Everybody has them. They’re what make us want to fuck. They’re what make women jealous when they smell another female on their mate. They’re what make men want to kill each other in bars filled with available women.

“This virus had been engineered to make people want to kill each other when they smelled other human pheromones. Any kind. It turned on the fight-or-flight response in our brains and turned us into reptiles trying to rip the throat out of any other animal with that same chemical fingerprint.

“The virus is highly contagious and we knew it could spread quickly if it got loose. In a few weeks every man and woman on this planet would be trying to murder each other with their hands and teeth.”

“Who would make something like that?” asked Mitchell.

“The Russians, the Chinese, us, maybe the Indians. It could be something an ally made and it got loose. The problem was that we knew it was out there. Somebody had it. And we had to do something about it. That’s when some clever people came up with an idea for how to inoculate us against it. We’d heard that Chinese party officials were getting vaccinated for some mysterious reason and we had to act.

“The problem is that the virus works even in its weakened form. So we needed to create something that acted just like it and prevent it from infecting in the first place and, if it did, override the chemical triggers it sent to the brain. That’s when we had the idea, my idea, to change the pheromone trigger from a general one to a specific one. Instead of targeting any human, only one unique pheromone could set it off.”

The man gestured toward Mitchell. “And that, my friend, is where you came in. It was a simple mistake. A mislabeled vial here, a truncated database, I don’t know the specifics, but I can draw you a picture.

“You donated blood three years ago on your college campus. A sample of it ended up in a lab looking for pheromone triggers in blood. Yours wasn’t special, no offense, it was just a control sample. From your blood we sequenced the part of your DNA that coded for one of your unique pheromones. Some we all share, others are one-in-a-sextillion combinations that will never occur in a billion years of human history. Instead of creating a random one to plug into our counter-virus, we fucked up. We used yours.

“A few weeks ago, we got the go-ahead to covertly inoculate the population. We began spreading the virus in subways, restaurants, everywhere. Its symptoms were so mild we were able to run under the cover of a convenient flu outbreak. I suspect the only person who got noticeably sick was you. Your body didn’t know what to make of it. That’s why you were sick at home. That might be why you’ve lasted this long.

“And so there’s the problem. If other people get a look at you, they’re going to realize that you’re perfectly healthy. We’re the ones who have been infected. We’ve covered our tracks so far by modifying gene libraries of pneumonia viruses and made sure that epidemiology reports are filtered through friendly hands. But it’s a small group of people trying to maintain a large conspiracy. That can’t last for very long if you’re alive.

“That’s why they’re going to come for you. They don’t see themselves as murderers. So they won’t come at you with guns and knives. They’re doctors. They’ll kill you via committee. A group of people will prescribe a treatment for a condition that doesn’t exist and just to be cautious they’ll treat you for other conditions as well until you’re dead. They’ll cure you to death so that people who know better can keep the real secret hidden. Once you’re dead, your body will be sealed up and buried away in some basement where they keep vials of smallpox and polio. A tentative explanation will be given, some kind of hormonal trigger you give off, and that will become the accepted wisdom because there will be no more Mitchell Roberts around to test and poke. The end.”

The man began to unlatch the buckles holding the top of the casket in place. “Of course, then the people who did this will get overconfident and the next time they might get even more sloppy. Or even worse, someone might decide we need to be proactive and create a virus that only gets the ‘bad’ guys and go ahead and release it. Or maybe the ‘bad’ people. It’s not like a nuclear missile where you need a thousand people to build, maintain and launch these things. All it takes is one asshole with a test tube.”

Mitchell watched as the man finished unlatching the casket. He picked up the screwdriver and lifted the container open like a clam shell. Mitchell eyed the screwdriver. The man turned it over and handed it to Mitchell handle first.

“Too bad they didn’t search you for this when you got inside,” said the man.

He reached to the floor and pulled out a small bag. He produced a syringe. Mitchell recoiled.

“Don’t worry, it’s for me, not you. We need to switch places, you in my suit, me in the casket, but in order to do that, I’m going to have to be unconscious, unless you want to fight me off. I’d rather we didn’t do it that way.”

“What do I do then?” Mitchell asked.

“When we come to a stop, they’ll unload me thinking I’m you. That’s when you need to get out and make it to my car. The keys are in the bag. From there you need to get away as fast as possible. In my car, you’ll find my laptop. There’s a file called ‘Great Wall.’ It’s what you want.”

Mitchell tried to put all of it together. “Is that a cure?”

The man laughed. “No. The only cure right now is transparency. You’ll need to share that file. It’s got everything in there about what happened. The problem is you can’t just e-mail it to people or upload it to Google.

“Ever since Wikileaks, we’ve taken some extreme measures to filter and protect sensitive information. Filters on e-mail servers. Worms on storage servers that cause disk failures when certain phrases show up. There’s even rooms full of people that do nothing now but create credible-looking forgeries of government documents to confuse and waste the time of people trying to find the truth.”

“So what do I do?” asked Mitchell.

“Keep doing what you’ve been doing. Run. Stay alive, and when you find a way, tell people everything. Broadcast it. The only safe place for you is in plain sight.”

The man opened the wrist of his suit and injected himself. “Place my body inside and cover my head with the pillow. Then move. You’ll have maybe two hours before they realize I drove my own car and my lab assistant is using the rental with the tracking. Then find some other way to keep going.”

The man’s eyes began to get droopy. Mitchell tried to think of anything else to ask him. A million questions came to mind.

“What’s your password?” asked Mitchell.

“Password … almost … for … got …” The man’s body began to go slack. Mitchell had to grab his shoulders to keep him from falling over. “Password … is … Lovestrange.”