Plague Year Read online

  That short rip of Velcro and two chimes from the heart monitor were their only conversation.

  The interior of the ISS offered less room than a four-car passenger train, though it was squashed into a maze of separate areas. They never managed to avoid each other completely. Wallace was an ex–Navy defensive back with too much time on his hands, and Ruth found that nothing cleared her head like a good sweat, and exercise aboard the station was limited to the bike and an adjacent pulley system. She might have come here regularly for no other reason except that the drawers and storage units that made up the walls were dotted with red and orange emergency labels, and some of the European medical supply cases secured to the ceiling were hazmat yellow—and in this small, metal world, she was always starved for color.

  Bill Wallace was no one’s idea of a recruiting poster. He had hair like rust and freckled cheeks pockmarked in adolescence by machine-gun acne, yet he’d been close to breaking the American record for hours in space before their long exile and, like Ruth, kicked ass at his job. He was an entire engineering team unto himself, electrical, mechanical, a fact that had kept him aboard the ISS when three of the seven-member crew were evacuated by the shuttle Discovery to extend the available oxygen, water, and food for Ruth’s benefit.

  He pushed closer without speaking or even bothering to telegraph his intent with a gesture. It didn’t matter. They’d performed this dance a hundred times. Ruth moved aside and Wallace rudely bumped past.

  She almost hollered right in his ear, anything for a response...except she’d learned the hard way that such pranks only deepened his silence.

  Ruth jaunted toward the bike. Passing over it, she caught hold by jamming the toes of one foot under the cushioned seat, then used her other foot like a pincher and pulled herself down. Momentum twisted her hips, however, and she whacked her butt on the backrest, ruining what might have been an excellent stunt.

  She would miss flying, somersaulting. It was a simple joy laced with many shades of guilt, frolicking during the apocalypse—and she would pay for it. Back on Earth she might be wheelchair-bound for a time. Muscle and bone degeneration were very real threats in zero gravity, and even special diets and nonstop exercise regimens could only slow that process.

  She glanced after Wallace before strapping herself down, an uneasy reflex. Silly. He would never hurt her, if only because he’d been ordered to regard her as his superior. All of the astronauts took as much pride in their discipline as she did in her work.

  Wallace had actually been among the crew members who volunteered to vacate the station, hoping to rejoin their families, but Control had deemed him too essential to long-term operations. That wasn’t the problem. No higher compliment could be paid to a man such as Wallace, and his wife and daughter had been crammed aboard a Florida National Guard plane along with other VIPs and made it to Pikes Peak in Colorado, 14,000 feet above sea level. They were presumed dead in the holocaust that swept the makeshift fuel depots last spring, yet had still been given a better chance than most.

  It was a packet of carrot juice that turned him against her. The whole thing was incredibly dumb, but they’d all been packed into this small hell for too long. Ruth could count more personality conflicts than there were personalities. Astronaut A didn’t like the way Astronauts B or C reorganized supplies, while B had gotten weird about singing country songs and argued with A, D, and E each time he disturbed them, and C thought D smelled especially bad and resented A calling him an idiot, et cetera.

  Their day-to-day existence was one of grim stagnation and Ruth had rigged two juice packets to burst in hope of lightening the mood, if only for a moment. Planning the trick had been a delight. Too bad Wallace got both of them. She hadn’t realized carrot was his favorite but he took it personally, and after they vacuumed up the second sticky cloud he’d ripped into her about safety violations and the possibility of damaged electronics.

  Ruth flinched suddenly when a low thump sounded close to her and then another, hands or feet against the walls. The heart monitor blipped in alarm and she twisted, bound by the bike’s Velcro straps.

  Derek Mills, Endeavour’s pilot, neatly stopped his approach by jamming himself in the passageway with one outstretched hand and one outstretched foot.

  Mills should have been good-looking. His brow and jaw were strong and smooth. But she didn’t like his carefully neutral expression or the way that he stole glances at her white cotton undershirt. Ruth managed to hide her chest with her elbow as she wiped at her forehead. “What?”

  Mills had thought the juice bombs were a riot. He’d flashed his perfect teeth at all of her jokes, chatting her up at every chance. He’d even stashed his share of the tubes of chocolate pudding and brought out these treasures in random moments for just the two of them—an odd, forced intimacy, taking turns pressing their lips to the same small plastic opening.

  He quit being friendly because he was a true believer in the space program, like most of the crew, and Ruth insisted now on grounding them, maybe forever.

  “Radio,” he said, then turned his back on her.

  She passed through a dark, chill section of the ISS and was suddenly aware of an aching throughout her body, a deficiency as real as scurvy. Mills thought this shell was their final glory. Ruth just wanted to see trees and sky again.

  Communications was a mess, a nest. Slips of paper torn from logbooks and packaging had been affixed to the walls in uneven groups, inked with names and frequencies and locations from all over the globe. It was a living record of the plague year. Many bits of information had been X’d out, and most of the rest had been altered at least once—and yet no slip of paper was ever taken down.

  Ruth squeezed in. Ulinov ordered this passageway cleared almost weekly and had even removed the offending supply cases himself many times, but the blockade always rematerialized. There was just too much extra gear aboard.

  She found Gus listening to bursts of static, so loud she didn’t say anything. He fingered his control panel with one hand and rubbed at his bald spot with the other, as if he were his own good-luck charm. Then he saw Ruth and waved and shut off the white noise. Apparently he’d been walking through channel after empty channel.

  “There you are,” he said. “Pop on this headset for me, we’re gonna set you up hush-hush, big news maybe, let me get ya dialed in through a satellite relay.”

  “Hi, Gus.”

  Communications Officer Gustavo Proano, left aboard to appease the Europeans, was the only crew member who’d grown more free with his thoughts during their endless wait. Force of habit. Trilingual, with a smattering of Farsi and Portuguese and learning more, Gustavo had more friends than anyone else alive, friends all over the world.

  Ruth still hadn’t figured out his habit of blockading himself in. He was the most gregarious person aboard. Maybe subconsciously he was trying to protect his radios.

  He waved again, hurrying her, and jabbered into a microphone too fast for anyone to answer. His English had a pronounced New York accent, but the blabbermouth personality came through in any language, even those where hello and how are you were his entire repertoire. “Leadville, this is the ISS. Leadville, come back, I gotcha contact waiting.”

  Ruth clipped on the earpiece and realized her hair was growing long again, starting to curl. Good. An astronaut’s buzz cut made her look like a monkey.

  “Leadville,” Gus said. “Leadville, Leadville...”

  During the late 1800s, at the height of the Gold Rush, Leadville had been a boomtown of thirty thousand frontiersmen attracted to central Colorado’s rich silver mines. In the twenty-first century, shrunk to just 3,000 residents, the modern claim to fame had been that at 10,150 feet elevation it was the highest incorporated “city” in the United States.

  Now it was the U.S. capital, and a rough census put the area’s population at 650,000.

  NORAD command shelters under Cheyenne Mountain had originally housed the president, the surviving members of Congress, an
d the most prominent men and women in nanotech. The subterranean base sat far below the barrier but was equipped with a self-contained air system to protect against radiation or biowarfare, and most of Ruth’s communications had been with NORAD until the locust got loose from a laboratory inside the complex.

  “ISS, this is Leadville,” drawled an unfamiliar voice, calm in her ear. “Stand by.”

  Gustavo chattered, “Roger that. You wanna power down?”

  “Stand by.”

  The partial evacuation of the NORAD base had reduced their working capacity by a full order of magnitude, just as the original plague had done. Once there had been more than a thousand researchers nationwide, then hundreds, finally mere dozens—and aside from India and a displaced Japanese team on Mt. McKinley, Alaska, no one else was even trying. Across the Alps, the Germans, French, Italians, and Swiss were embroiled in war with starving refugee populations and each other, lost like the Russians, and the Brazilian scientists in the Andes had stopped broadcasting before the end of the first winter.

  Ruth reached for the lists of contacts plastered over the nearest wall but stopped short of disturbing them. So many names and places had been crossed out, she wondered how Gus could stand the constant reminder. Gruesome. Yet clearly something in him was satisfied by surrounding himself with data, and with physical barriers.

  “Hey, hello, am I on?” This new voice spoke almost as fast as Gustavo, trained by months of power shortages.

  “James,” Ruth said. “I hear you.”

  “I have—”

  The other voice on the ground intervened. “This is a secure call, ISS communications. Please clear the channel.”

  “Roger that.” Gustavo turned and winked at her before he swam toward the exit. So far, she’d chosen to share every piece of news with the rest of the crew, classified or not. She felt they deserved it. Why keep secrets anymore? The soldiers down there only bothered because it gave them something to do.

  Ruth opened her mouth to speak but there was a low, menacing click. Gus had identified the sound as recording equipment and it raised gooseflesh up the back of her neck.

  She yearned for clean air, a horizon, new faces, but felt it would be sinful to envy anyone on the ground. She was among the safest and best-fed members of the human race.

  They had been informed that the situation in Colorado was stable, yet Ruth caught hints of a different truth in these conversations—unexplained delays, obvious shortages, names that seemed to have permanently disappeared. She’d tried to chitchat, digging for more, but was usually interrupted and once had been cut off entirely. Power conservation, they said. Other times, the scientists she spoke with deflected her questions or ignored her outright. Why?

  If she’d known any of them, if she had any friends there, she might have pressed. But their relationships were as narrow as the thin umbilical connecting her headset to the radio.

  James said, “I have good news and I have good news.”

  “Well I always say hear the good news first.” Ruth tried to make her smile show in her voice. Too many of these contacts were litanies of despair.

  She had actually met James Hollister at a convention in Philadelphia, years ago, and had a vague image of thick glasses and a great Moby Dick of a desk-belly. Her memory of his published work was stronger. He’d led a new approach in nanobiotic medicine, using synthesized amino acids to pierce bacterial membranes and thereby kill infections. That was a field related to the current problem only in the loosest sense, but James was no dummy and had brought a unique perspective to their efforts to build an anti-nano nano. ANN.

  He’d volunteered for this coordinating position to free up others with more appropriate skill sets, and Ruth was glad. She talked to him six times out of ten and no one else made jokes anymore, not even sorry little puns like good news, good news.

  “We’ve redesigned our engine,” he said, “pushing burn efficiency up almost 5 percent.”

  “Great.” Chemical science was his specialty, after all. “I suppose that’s great, James, but what does it matter? We can just enlarge the ANN if we need more capacity.”

  Silence. Static.

  She almost didn’t say it. “You’re wasting time, getting fancy. We have a functional rep algorithm. We can go as big as we want—5 percent, 10, it doesn’t matter. I thought we agreed to focus on discrimination.”

  “Ruth, we needed something we could point to, something real. LaSalle’s bug tested solid and the president’s council is talking about reassigning everyone to him.”

  “What! Did he run real-world or in lab conditions?”

  “Lab, if it matters.”

  “Of course it matters! We test out in controlled conditions, too. What did you tell them?”

  “I told them our burn efficiency was up 5 percent.”

  This time it was Ruth who didn’t answer immediately. Then she laughed. “Okay, I guess that is good news.”

  There had never been a consensus on how to deal with the situation. Everyone wanted to destroy the locust, of course, but at present there were no less than three competing proposals— and twice that many concepts had been discarded in the past months. A shortage of equipment meant much of their work was theoretical anyway, and nanotech developers in any field tended to be both visionaries and a bit wiggy about their favorite ideas. The end of the world hadn’t changed that.

  The end of everything had probably made it worse. Too much was at stake, and the name of the person who defeated the machine plague might become greater than Muhammad or Christ.

  “LaSalle’s an idiot,” Ruth said, and her earpiece rattled with two thumps, maybe James shrugging.

  Or maybe it was whoever else was listening.

  She didn’t care. She said, “I guess he’s still shouting from the rooftops that discrimination is a waste of time?”

  “He’s got half the council agreeing with him.”

  “James, there’s no way it can work otherwise. He can’t ignore the issue just because it’s inconvenient.”

  Any real-world nano had to overcome three major hurdles, and integrating each solution into a functioning whole was in a sense the fourth and most difficult challenge.

  First was how to power something so abysmally tiny. Ruth’s teachers had called this the Tin Man Problem—if we only had a heart. Dozens of possibilities existed using synthesized fuels, proteins, live current, heat. The trick was to dedicate as little capacity as possible to energy storage and/or generation.

  Second came the Scarecrow—if we only had a brain. Nature’s oldest, most fundamental intelligence was based on chemical reactions like those of RNA and James’s amino acids, simplistic and neat, enough for some biotech, but it was a real chore to bestow the faculties of awareness and decision upon machines this size without crimping their operational speed.

  The third problem, known in polite company as the Wicked Witch, was how to create enough nanos to accomplish a goal of any worth. Manually assembling one gear composed of five hundred atoms could take a person sixty hours, depending on the material and equipment used. Automation might accelerate the process but it wasn’t economically viable, spending millions of dollars to build factories to build the nanos.

  A leading school of thought had been to bed the Scarecrow with the Witch. Nanos capable of fulfilling instructions should also be able to assemble more of themselves. Their function was their form. Once again, the infinitesimal scale had hindered efforts to master this approach, but crude kilo-atom prototypes had been doing it since before Ruth entered college.

  No single aspect of the locust was revolutionary. What made it so efficient was how well it had been put together.

  For a power source the locust used the body heat of its host, which required only a few receptors at key points in the locust’s structure. As for a brain, the locust’s creators had overcome this hurdle by dodging it altogether. The machine was remarkably straightforward. It infested warm-blooded tissue because it was unable to
function in any other environment, and it assembled more identically limited yet aggressive creatures because it had been told to do so. Period. Everyone agreed that the locust as they knew it was just a test model, and yet Gary LaSalle wanted to adopt this method for his ANN.

  What a joke. Igor, fetch me a brain! Ruth must have taken her ribbing too far, though, because two months ago LaSalle had quit talking to her on the radio.

  He was right that the locust functioned quickly because it lacked complex instructions, but the man was a complete boob if he thought they could sweep the planet clean with an ANN lacking discrimination. The job was too big, the battlefield too varied. More importantly, out there in the world, below 10,000 feet, the locusts had no more hosts and would be in hibernation. They were inert, inactive targets and even a slowly replicating ANN would eventually destroy the vast majority.

  The idea was simple: release their best work, then wait and watch. But who would be the savior?

  LaSalle’s ANN, more like a chemical reaction than a machine, was composed of oxygen-heavy carbon molecules intended to bond the locusts into nonfunctional, supra-molecular clusters. Fast and dirty. James had helped pioneer the process, “snowflaking,” before declaring it unstable—and yet LaSalle’s ANN remained the smallest and the quickest to replicate, a fact he’d constantly harped upon when he was still trying to enlist Ruth’s help.

  Another faction, perhaps the most ambitious, imagined a parasite ANN that would deliver new programming to the locusts, take advantage of the locusts’ extra capacity, and turn the damned things against each other. This group was still cranking out diagnostics and computer simulations, however, and no one else believed they’d advance beyond the planning stage.

  Ruth belonged to the third team, which consisted mostly of techs with military and government backgrounds like her own. They had constructed a hunter-killer whose entire life cycle was based on disassembling locusts. A true weapon. It would burn a portion of a locust for fuel while using the rest to build more ANN like itself, and this design had been the early front-runner until the president’s council grew understandably desperate.