The Ares Decision

69

Sarie van Keuren moved carefully in her hazmat suit, constantly glancing back at the poorly maintained tubes supplying her with fresh air. The lab had the look of something slapped together over the course of a few weeks, with containment protocols that were well below one hundred percent functionality. And anything less than one hundred percent might as well be zero.

She could credit Omidi with one thing, though. He’d been incredibly diligent in making certain that the lab — and virtually every other room she used — shared a glass wall with the cell where he kept his parasite victim. A constant reminder of where she would end up if she didn’t behave.

The man Omidi had called a rapist and murderer was fully symptomatic now but hadn’t yet started to weaken. Every move she or the people working in adjacent rooms made attracted him, and he went back and forth in a mindless frenzy, slamming into the glass barrier over and over in a desperate attempt to find the parasite a new host.

She tried to forget about him, but it didn’t do much to calm her. A few feet away, De Vries’s corpse was lying on a table with the top of his head missing and an expression of rage frozen into his face. Blood had pooled on the floor beneath him due to a backed-up drain that probably just emptied untreated into the ground. Overall, better than Bahame’s cave, but only just.

The slide in her microscope contained one of many cross sections of his brain, which combined with a heavily monitored Internet connection, had been useful in confirming some of her guesses about the infection and providing some surprising refutations of others.

The initial targets of the parasite were the frontal lobe and anterior cingulate cortex, virtually shutting off any complex reasoning that would allow the victim to control base emotions such as rage or to understand the potential consequences of their actions.

Even more interesting was the damage to mirror neurons that had a hand in giving humans empathy and a connection to others. The pattern of damage was very specific, though, and she wasn’t sure why. A compelling hypothesis was that it destroyed victims’ ability to identify with uninfected humans while allowing them to continue to identify with infected humans — thus explaining why they didn’t attack each other.

Most interesting, though, was the bleeding. The capillaries in the head burst due to high concentrations of the parasite in that area and not necessarily because the infection was targeting them specifically. It was similar to sneezing or coughing or diarrhea — a symptom that evolution selected because it allowed for the spread and survival of the pathogen. In the end, though, the bleeding from the hair was nowhere near as bad as it appeared. Victims did not die of blood loss as everyone assumed. They died as a result of brain damage.

The parasite multiplied unchecked and seemed to have a frighteningly slippery genetic code that adapted quickly. As crowding in the targeted areas got worse, parasites with a mutated taste for other parts of the brain became increasingly successful. Eventually, they began going after areas controlling autonomic functions such as heart rate, thermoregulation, and respiration.

The good news was that it was far more than she’d expected to learn in such a short time. The bad news was that she wasn’t sure what she was going to do with the information.