The Virus (16 page)

“You can’t imagine just how important
this information may be.” Dr. Crangler asserted solemnly as he
disappeared out of the room.

“You may be surprised.”
Geoffrey whispered after the doctor was gone. He lay down to rest,
but did not sleep. Instead, he just lay there with his eyes shut
tightly. Behind his closed lids, he saw a panorama of alien symbols
as well as the ideas they signified, in human language. After about
thirty minutes, he would get up, grab a notebook, and complete the
next round of translations. This went on for hours and hours—with
Dr. Crangler carefully watching the entire time—until all the
notebooks were filled. After Geoffrey finished the last page of the
last notebook, he lay back down again, but this time, he did sleep.
He slept long and hard, as he had before, and no wonder; he had
just written untold thousands of words freehand, of things no human
mind would’ve been able to conceive otherwise. Meanwhile, Dr.
Crangler quickly retrieved the notebooks as soon as it was clear
that Geoffrey had finished with them. After replacing them with
fresh ones (just in case Mr. Summons had more to write), he made a
swift beeline for his office, but not before informing every member
of his staff that under
no
circumstances was he to be bothered until he
stipulated otherwise.

Afterward, he sat down in front of a
broad table and a bank of monitors by which he could see both Mr.
Summons and Miss Hanson, and dove headfirst (almost literarily)
into the notebooks Geoffrey had recently filled. He expected to
find great things, and not only would he not be disappointed, but
even his loftiest expectations were exceeded by what he eventually
found.

Chapter 14

When Dr. Crangler finally lifted his
head from his all-consuming studies, he too, looked somehow
slightly aged. He didn’t realize it, but he had been completely and
totally engrossed in the material for hours. He would’ve gladly
remained in his ardent studies if his body hadn’t demanded
reprieve. He stood up and stretched. In the process, every inch of
his frame groaned with agitation. He decided to take a short walk
through the halls of facility, if for nothing else, to allow him to
return to studying the notebooks without oversurfeiting his
middle-aged body. He hit the button to unlock his door and was
startled to find a few of his assistants waiting just
outside.

“Dr. Crangler,” one of them spoke
hastily, “the Hanson patient wants to see you. She
won’t…”

“I don’t have time for Miss Hanson
right now.” the doctor interrupted.

“But she…” the assistant tried to
resume.

“Give her whatever she
wants.” the doctor barked. The assistants turned flabbergasted
faces toward each other. Delilah was making some pretty unusual
demands—at least by the standards of men who knew little of
pampered feminine preferences—and the assistants frowned at one
another. To supply her with what she was asking went greatly beyond
the bounds of protocol. Besides, it was Dr. Crangler who demanded
that she be given only what he authorized. Well, he had just
authorized
everything
, and at the moment, it didn’t look like it would bode well
for the person who tried to talk some sense into him. Every one of
the assistants had, like the doctor, worked extensively in this
facility and had been grilled on the proper chain of command, and
in this particular chain, the doctor was the preeminent link. If he
said that Delilah Hanson was to have whatever she wanted, then
Delilah Hanson was to have whatever she wanted. The unnerved
assistants went to fulfill their orders while their withdrawn
superior roamed the white halls nearest his office with nothing
other than alien symbols and their translated meanings dominating
his every thought.

Once he felt that he had walked
enough, he returned to his office (and more importantly, to the
notebooks) and again, soon lost himself in study. Much of the
information in the notebooks dealt with vivid, albeit utterly
confusing, truths about the alien intelligence from whose planet
the fragment originated. It described the nature of their foreign
community as well as space-time in general. It spoke of the
composition of stars and the peculiar science of galaxies and
though, thanks to Geoffrey, it was in English, Dr. Crangler
couldn’t make heads or tails of much of it. There were, however,
more than a few observations that the doctor understood. Among
these revelations was the fact the fragment was actually an
infinitesimally small piece of the alien’s home planet. As it
turned out, the aliens that the doctor had been studying were the
same species that sent the fragment. Dr. Crangler had speculated
that the alien bodies were simply ‘housings’, and he was more
correct than he probably knew. According the information in the
notebooks, this alien community was comprised of a single super
consciousness inhabiting many such ‘housings’. Common knowledge and
ability was spread amongst the aliens using light as a vehicle.
This, of course, explained how Mr. Reynolds could suddenly be privy
to alien secrets just by touching the fragment. The manipulation of
light as a way to spread information was simply ingenious.
Unfortunately, though, this alien intelligence was trying to use
that ingenuity to end all human life on Earth.

If an intelligence wanted
to share (or in this case,
spread
) something to someone that
was hundreds, or perhaps millions, of light years away, then the
only practical way to do that would be to use light. Since what was
being spread was a virus, the best way to spread it efficiently
would be to use something native and abundant on the receiving
planet by which The Virus could easily propagate: Earth’s oxygen
supply. Earth had hosted alien encounters before, not many, but
enough to give some merit to the fabulous claims with which the
public at large was familiar. Though much about these alien
encounters was heavily fabricated, one thing the movies got right
was that every attempted invasion by aliens somehow ended in
defeat. The fact of the matter, as the aliens apparently learned,
was that Earth was a planet abundant in resources, many of which
could not be found on any other planet in the universe, but it was
also a planet abundant in organisms that subsisted off of those
resources. As a result alien entities had no defense against these
hostile and unsympathetic organisms. As had been observed by one of
the great writers on the subject, man had paid in his own blood, to
the tune of billions of lives, for the right to reside among the
kaleidoscope spectrum of bacteria and flora, viruses and diseases,
plagues and natural disasters, that also called Earth
home.

The very thing that man, in
all his consorted wisdom, could not overcome,
himself—microorganisms and the diseases they inspire—always proved
to be the undoing of alien entities, so the aliens regrouped and
devised another plan. Earth was simply too valuable to be allowed
to languish in the hands of ignorant humans with their trivial
pursuits and overinflated senses of self. If the aliens could not
invade the blue jewel of the universe directly, then they would
annihilate its hordes of mankind with a virus, purge its
unforgiving atmosphere, and claim it as their own. According to the
notebooks, the virus that was plaguing the planet at present was,
by no means, the first. The Black Death was the most well-known
(though it was not known that it had been instituted by aliens),
and to a lesser extent, the Great Plague, but the mostly-overlooked
fact of the matter was that since The Black Death that had
eventually claimed over half the population of an entire continent,
a catastrophic plague of some kind had been ravaging the planet
every ten years or so, right up until relatively modern times. The
only reason for this brief cessation of viral hostilities was that
those unseen aliens had recognized that man could not be eradicated
so easily. Man’s numbers had dwindled dramatically, but still, he
somehow survived every invasion, every systematic spread of
disease, basically everything that could be thrown at him aside
from destroying the entire planet with him on it. It was as
if
he
was the
plague and intelligences far exceeding his own could not formulate
a cure.

So came the next phase in
the war that only an elite few had recently recognized that the
planet was even engaged in. Man had apparently earned immunity from
eradication by disease, but he was still not invincible. Sure, his
body had become expert at killing off diseased cells, even if it
meant the sacrifice of his own cells, which he would simply
regenerate what he could and adapt to life without the ones he
couldn’t. As natural selection clearly showed, where he failed, his
offspring would only grow stronger. It was astonishing at first for
the extraterrestrials when they discovered that deadly viruses were
actually administered by man himself—flu shots, for example—with
the result that he only forged a greater immunity, but his profound
ability to recoup and regenerate was also his weakness. Just as the
most efficient diseases don’t stop at simply killing off cells,
but, like cancer, actually manipulated the body into producing more
of
itself
, so the
aliens devised a virus that would distort the way man produced his
very offspring. This virus didn’t need to kill every man, woman,
and child to be effective, it only had to effectively stop them
from reproducing.

Once Dr. Crangler took
another break from mulling over this and other information, his
eyes were red, his face was sullen, and his mind was exhausted. He
was a man well used to professional fatigue, but even he had not
given so much energy to such unfettered study as this since his med
school years fifteen years ago. Much of the information about The
Virus he already knew, but with this new, supplemental information,
a picture of the reality at hand began to coalesce in his
imagination that was even more viscous and appalling than he was
prepared for. Even though he had experimented on alien bodies
extensively, he had never really viewed them as beings capable of
feelings and emotions. To him, they were potential foreign
invaders, advanced beings with remarkable intelligence, but no
other relatable qualities. They were things to be studied and
defended against, but certainly not things to be
related
to. Now,
realizing that aliens had been experimenting on humans eons before
the reverse was true, he felt suddenly violated. He had never
attributed human emotion to these beings, but now he saw them as
cruel and evil, affecting the demise of millions, even billions of
precious human lives in their relentless pursuit of
acquisition.

Then the doctor’s mind
began to wander to many of his own studies of other organisms on
the planet. Hadn’t he, just like the other doctors and scientists
of the world, performed countless experiments upon animals, other
organisms, and at times, even people, in order to manipulate their
resources for mankind’s own endeavors? Hadn’t man routinely wiped
out entire populations of fellow organisms for the sake of its own
betterment? If this line of logic was to be followed, then who was
to say that the organisms on the planet that were not to man’s
liking didn’t deserve to exist more than man himself? After all,
many of them had been here long before man. What if what this alien
life form was attempting to do was actually poetic justice? Musings
like these didn’t sit well with the doctor, so he cast them aside.
It was not comfortable imagining that
he
was the culture in the Petri dish
and
aliens
were,
in fact, the dominant species, peering over him, deciding his
ultimate fate. Man was the rightful heir to Earth, Dr. Crangler
reminded himself, and he resolved to double his efforts to thwart
this, the aliens’ latest attempts to forever remove man from his
blue marble throne. Mankind would not be subdued on his watch, the
doctor told himself. It all sounded really good, but just now, Dr.
Crangler felt that he had only enough resolve to do one thing, and
that was to lay his head on his desk and rest. He didn’t realize
that he hadn’t slept in the last thirty hours, so totally was he
enthralled in Geoffrey’s notebooks, but his body did, and it
assured him that it would not cooperate any further without a
break.

Chapter 15

Geoffrey sat up in his bed and looked
around. He had just awakened a few moments earlier and felt more
refreshed than he had since he got here. The hypnotic effect of
having little to no visual stimuli was both draining and oddly
confusing, so the significance was not lost upon Geoffrey that he
felt much better in spite of his unchanging surroundings. He wiped
his eyes, stretched his limbs, and thought for a moment. He had it!
The fact that he had finished with the notebooks was the reason he
felt so sublime. Finally getting all of that information out of his
head and onto paper was like clearing an insanely crowded fish tank
of most of its occupants. He fancied that he thought more clearly,
saw more clearly (which wasn’t saying much, since there was only
white to see), and even his body was replenished. His appetite had
returned as well.

He turned toward the upper
corner of the room where he knew the surveillance camera was hidden
and motioned that he was hungry. While he waited, he thought over a
few things until his mind inevitably found its way to the subject
of the late Mr. Reynolds. It struck Geoffrey as odd that he hadn’t
thought more of what happened to the astronomer before now, but
with the doctor constantly pressuring him to finish the notebooks,
it was no wonder he didn’t have much time to think on anything
else. Now that he finally had time to think, he wondered what
became of the scientist. Oddly enough, though, he wasn’t as alarmed
for Mr. Reynolds as he would’ve thought. Somehow, he knew that the
scientist was all right, wherever he was, just like he knew that
there were three men watching him via the hidden camera, and that
Dr. Crangler was sound asleep somewhere in the building. Among the
things he didn’t know, however, was just
how
he knew these things. He thought
about how Mr. Reynolds had communicated with him telepathically
before being reduced to dust. It was an experience that he couldn’t
put into words. Geoffrey imagined that it would be like trying to
explain colors to one born blind, or perhaps trying to explain the
phenomenon of thought to a vegetable or a rock. When Mr. Reynolds
spoke into his mind, he heard the words more clearly than if they
were spoken audibly, but he couldn’t
hear
them, exactly. The images Mr.
Reynolds introduced into his mind were more distinctive than if
they had been plotted by a great artist, but he didn’t
see
them, exactly. This
was the only discernible explanation he could give, even to
himself, of what had taken place in that room.