This Green Hell

TWENTY-THREE

Inside the CDC lab, Maria’s computer screen was completely dark now, no human blood cells discernible among the black sea of bacteria.

‘Remove the slide,’ she told her son. ‘We’ll use those live samples as our test bed.’

Michael nodded and slipped his hands into the gauntlets either side of the isolation cube. As the gloves gripped the glass slide, Maria saw the image alter.

‘Hold it.’ She leaned in close to the screen, her brow furrowed. ‘Remove your fingers from the slide.’

‘What’s up? What is it?’ Michael’s voice was worried.

Maria ignored him. ‘Place your fingers near the slide again … slowly. That’s it …’ She fiddled with the magnification on the screen and took still images of the movement progression.

‘Amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

The dark sea on the screen had parted into two groups either side of the slide — right where Michael’s fingers gripped its edges.

‘Michael, this is simply astounding — I’ve seen micro-organisms exhibiting chemotaxis before, but nothing like this. We know that bacteria with motility structures can direct their movements according to certain chemicals in their environment — so, find food by swimming towards the highest concentration of attractive molecules, or flee from toxins. But these things aren’t using a random walk or corkscrew motion; they’re actually lining up like army ants.’

Maria replayed the images. At first, the Hades Bug was just a mass of micro-scale bodies; then Michael grasped the sample slide. The cells immediately formed into two clumps, each swarming towards his fingers. When Michael removed his hands, as Maria had asked, the bacteria floated back to a central clump. His hands appeared again, and they instantly coalesced into two halves and swarmed towards his fingers.

Michael looked pale behind his protective lenses. ‘What does this mean? How could they even detect me through the gauntlets? How could a microorganism be that socially responsive and organised?’

Maria replayed the images again. ‘Traces of body heat, the pulse of your blood through your fingertips, sensitivity to movement; or maybe something we’re not even aware of. What concerns me is the way they suddenly acted cooperatively. In my time, I’ve see all manner of clumping, fusion and bacterial agglutination, but never have I witnessed this much coordination in a bacterial population.’

Maria sat back and stared at the screen, not conscious of Michael’s voice until he touched her shoulder.

‘You think the cells may be sentient? Or at least be able to communicate?’ He sat down beside her.

‘No, impossible. They don’t think. More likely it’s some form of chemical signalling, quorum sensing, or some other pathway … I just don’t know yet. Dr Weir brought this strain of bacteria up from over a mile below the Earth’s surface. It’s likely it’s travelled through a billion billion generations without ever encountering animate life. It could have evolved all sorts of abilities for detecting carbon food sources, its own genotype, and maybe even for defence.’

Maria got to her feet, walked to the cabin door and pushed it open a crack. New humid air flowed in to replace the stale humid air. She mentally added in the new pieces of this microbiological jigsaw puzzle: one hundred per cent lethality, high communicability, rapid transmission to a terminal stage, no known vaccine or treatment. And at this point she wasn’t even sure if they had it contained within the quarantine zone or whether it was already spreading out into the jungle through the local fauna.

She turned back to her son. ‘We’ve got forty-eight hours — by then we need to have developed a vaccine.’

While Michael worked on the vaccine, there were a few other precautions to put in place around the camp. Maria searched through the bags they’d brought with them, found what she was looking for, and went outside. She saw Alex Hunter coming out of Aimee Weir’s cabin and waved him over.

‘Captain Hunter …’ She pulled the facemask down off her nose and mouth. ‘How do you do it?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘How do you manage to look so fresh all the time? I know you’ve had as little sleep as the rest of us, and you carried most of the equipment. Do you take stimulants?’

He gave her a hard stare. ‘Just training. Is there anything I can do for you? Have you got everything you need?’

Maria narrowed her eyes. ‘Whatever you say, Captain. I’d just hate to see you or any of your team collapse because they’re taking uppers in this heat. It can cause respiratory shock, you know.’

Alex just grunted, and she decided to get the point.

‘Michael and I are going to attempt to create a vaccine, but, given the limited resources and time, we’re going to need a lot of luck. In the meantime, we need to do all we can to limit new outbreaks. We don’t know yet how the infection spreads, but we can guard against one of the most common vectors — insects.’ She pulled two large unlabelled spray cans from the bag at her feet. ‘I need your people to fumigate all the dwellings, and under the cabin floor areas too. May be a good idea to take it right up to the edges of the clearing.’

Alex nodded. ‘Makes sense.’ He took the cans, sniffed and recoiled, holding them slightly away from his body. ‘Is this DDT?’

‘Stop being a big baby; of course it is. For tropical regions, it’s still the most effective, long-lasting chemical for dealing with blood-sucking insects. Don’t worry, Captain, I’m sure it’s not going to end up in blue whale blubber or babies’ milk down here. And right now, our priority issue is to prevent the microbes’ transmission — wouldn’t you agree?’

Alex didn’t look convinced. ‘Hmm, okay. Anything else?’

‘I think, for insurance, we should also set up braziers burning damp jungle foliage every ten feet to create a smoke curtain to dissuade the higher flying insects from entering the camp. It won’t be very pleasant, but it means we’ll be able to move around in the evenings without having to reapply insect repellent every hour.’

‘Consider it done. Anything else?’

Maria smiled. ‘Done for now, but come back later and I’ll give you a briefing on our progress.’

As she stepped back, Michael’s voice could be heard calling to her from inside the lab. He sounded concerned.

When Maria re-entered the cabin, Michael was standing with his hands on his hips gazing at a sealed Petri dish suspended over a portable heat pad in the isolation cube. Maria could see that the dish’s contents had been reduced to ash.

‘Mitéra, I think we’ve got a problem,’ he said.

‘The attenuation process? What’s happened?’

‘It’s not working. I’ve tried three different samples — all resisted the increasing temperature until they reached a critical point, and then they just incinerated. I expected this to be a heat-tolerant microbe given its pedigree, but this little horror is amazing. Normally, microorganism attenuation occurs from about 120 to 160 degrees. But at 180 degrees, it showed no visible sign of any change to its form, shell or contents of its cells. So I kept going higher …’

Michael replayed the last few minutes of his work on Maria’s computer screen; as they watched, the temperature gauge increased to 500 degrees.

‘Oh my God,’ whispered Maria.

The gauge continued to rise, its red line passing 600, then 700, then 800. At 1000 degrees, the dish started to register activity.

‘This is past the tolerance of any known microbial thermophile,’ Maria said. ‘Or even any previously encountered extremophile. It should be totally denatured now, but we seem to be seeing the exact opposite. In fact, I think the heat’s causing some sort of cellular bud acceleration.’

At 1200 degrees, the bacteria in the Petri dish turned into a boiling broth, then exploded with activity. Areas of the dish that were once devoid of the twisting dark bacteria were quickly filled. Maria could see that the temperature gauge was rising rapidly; the red line moved past 1500 degrees and the isolation cube, built to withstand enormous heat, started to swirl with colour as the panels expanded. The bacteria in the dish all pulsed at once, then thickened. Individual cells lost definition — the broth had started to solidify.

Michael spoke softly. ‘Agglutination after five minutes at 1800 degrees. Activity, but hard to discern as the light won’t pass through the solid single object. The dish has now doubled its weight … and increased its mass by 1000 times.’

‘What the hell is happening here? Is it changing form somehow?’ Maria couldn’t take her eyes from the glutinous mass in the dish that pulsed like a living organ. The red line of the temperature gauge approached 2000 degrees.

‘I’m reaching maximum temperature with the heat disc,’ Michael said wearily. ‘I would have needed to swap to an open flame to go any higher, but …’ He paused, and, like a spoiled cake, the mass collapsed, shrivelled and turned to a powdery, dust-like substance. ‘Eleven minutes, seventeen seconds … then total incineration. There’s nothing left — no shell walls, nothing. Not even DNA fragments. Just a fine mineral substance that’s akin to something like carbon or diamond dust.’

Maria’s mind was racing: 2000 degrees — that’s atmosphere-entry temperature. She thought again of Aimee’s comment about iridium in the original sample; and recalled the description of the “bleeding” stone discovered miles under the earth at the Egoli mine. She stared at the cooling cube, her mind testing different hypotheses, turning over the options.

‘I’ve tried this several times now,’ Michael said, ‘always with the same result. There’s a collar temperature, which, once pushed through, results in the bacteria being immediately destroyed. Up until then, it’s not only extremely vibrant, it almost looks like it’s turning from individual bacterium into some sort of coalesced multicellular life form.’

Maria swung around in her seat to look at him and he rushed to qualify his comments. ‘I know, I know — that’s impossible. But maybe Dr Weir’s right; perhaps we should be considering radiation to destroy the cells.’

‘No,’ Maria said quickly. ‘We continue with the heat process. It’s just a very robust and vigorous thermophile. It’s utilising heat the same way as a food source — just a little more energetically.’ She thought for a moment. ‘We can’t keep pushing it to 2000 degrees for every attempt at attenuation — slows the retesting process too much.’ She stood up and walked to the isolation box. ‘We’ve got power now, and therefore the cooling systems are working. So … use heat-shock — means you shouldn’t need to push it up to such a high temperature to achieve your results. Cool it with ice for thirty minutes then immediately place it onto the preheated disc. The thermal displacement shock should destroy it. Not even viruses with armoured protein coats can stand up to that.’

She looked down at the cube and frowned, leaned forward and sniffed. ‘And check the seals when it’s cool. I think I can smell a heat-production vapour.’