Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 2

The Plan

Dr. Krill, Adam, and Dr. Katie stood in the low ceilinged Vrul council chamber at the center of the city. The entire room was as Adam had remembered it, with large glass windows looking out at all 360 degrees of the city. At one point he had assumed it was just the selfish desire of the ruling class to look down on the citizens, but as he looked, he could now see that there was some utility to the tower, almost a watch tower over the city. The canals and structure of the city itself could be sectioned off if there was ever an emergency, cut like a pie into triangular sections that could be excluded from the force shield if it was ever needed.

As soon as their historian had put forward her hypothesis, the Vrul council had been called to order, and a few other GA members were now sitting in on the meeting remotely. They would have come themselves, but upon hearing about the horrible creatures that were, even now, clawing at their walls, the council had ordered the shield sup for what must have been the first time in millennia.

Luckily for them, they had never let the shields fall into disrepair, and as he looked out the window he could see the shimmering blue purple nexus of power glistening in the sky above them.

It worried him thinking that the ancient Vrul had deemed it necessary to have a force field that went into the sky as well. Dr. Kell had had a ruptured helium sack when they brought him in, but that gave the assumption that, perhaps, he would still have been able to float in his infected state, which was not something that bare thinking about, though it WAS an important item to consider.

"Yes, all the evidence does seem to point to that." The counselor said, their head turned towards the GA chairwoman as they spoke, "We have contacted the other cities along the central line and they report their cities are built in much the same way. Satellite imaging shows clusters of.... The nesting sights all over the world, though their greatest cluster happens to be around our city. If each circle has approximately seven of the creatures burrowed below it, we estimate about 49,000 of the creatures possibly burrowed below our landscape. The animals in the area seem to know to steer clear of the nesting sites. The larger animals have moved in great migrations towards the poles where there are few of the nesting sites, and the animals who have a lighter step are prone to avoiding the circle when they can. Zoomed in pictures DO show the occasional skeletalized remains of some creature or another, but it is hard to tell what they died from.

The GA chairwoman was nodding, "So you believe that the cities were built for a different reason than originally thought."

There was a pause and then the council nodded, "Yes, it seems likely that Vrul lived in open cities before the outbreak began and then built the city in defense against the creatures. The Deltas, we have found are the main spreading vector, since they are stronger and faster, they are more mobile, but the disease affects everyone similarly causing acute aggression and infected pustules filled with sores that rupture and spread a cloud into the air."

Dr. Krill stepped forward just then to cut into the conversation, "Dr. Katie and I have examined the infection under controlled conditions, and it is clearly a disease that originated on this planet. It does not have the structures you would assume from a viral or bacterial infection common on worlds where the creatures are more animal than plant. In this case the subject does seem primarily interested in infecting our species. The disease is transmissible primarily through respiration where the spores enter the body and into the lungs, as it were, where they are dissolved and the toxin spreads directly through to the brain. It will then destroy most of the decision making and memory centers of the cortex, amp up aggression, and then start germinating more spores in those packets that we have seen."

"So it isn't contagious to other species." The Chair woman asked

Krill shook his head, "I did not say that. While it is a disease that is meant for plant-like liforms, any creature with lungs similar to ours are also under direct fire of infection. Humans for example send blood directly to their brain from the lungs, and have cortical centers that are generally analogous to our own. Of course, humans have the blood brain barrier that would be much less likely to allow that to happen, so I don't see a mental breakdown as part of its affect on humans, but I do imagine they could develop sores that could burst and be contagious."