Angel Virus [ONC 2022]

Chapter Two. KGZ-56.

Their plastic-muffled voices informed me that my destination was a quarantine ward at Delphia Sacred Heart. Two had guns and badges strapped on, outside the white plastic. I don't think it would have occurred to me to refuse, anyway.

I climbed into the back of an ambulance, accompanied by an apologetic drone about possible virus exposure and better-safe-than-sorry.

My initial incomprehension spun into a repetitive loop of angst. Fear, anger, frustration, and boredom took turns like four clowns on unicycles. At the hospital they made me undress and wear paper clothes. My quarantine bay looked like a set for Star Trek, all glass and aluminum. It smelled faintly of alcohol and nothing else. All other scents had been sterilized away.

The angst-clowns took another spin when I realized I had a next door neighbor, and that neighbor was Dr. Iona Friel. An Ackerman-Castro-Hearst Distinguished Chair had special clout, though. Dr. Friel wore regular clothes, and sat amid a bristling array of lab equipment. I could see her typing furiously on a laptop through a generous window that separated our respective bays. Thick, soundproof glass. There were 6 bays in all, arranged like petals on a flower. Windows separated them all, but curtains could provide privacy. Meals, I discovered, were slid in through an airlock at the front of my bay, by the door.

My other next door neighbor appeared an hour later, ushered in by a polite shambling mound of plastic. The angst-clowns revved up for another circuit: It was Trixie.

She carried an armload of paper clothing, eyes roving behind her thick lenses. I plastered myself to the intervening window like a bug on a windshield. She managed a smile when she saw me, but I could see the glint of unshed tears past those lenses.

She joined me in the renewed cycle of fear, anger, and frustration, albeit silently on the other side of the glass. Inevitably came the boredom. When we ran out of funny faces to make at each other, we leaned our foreheads against the window that separated us and moped.

I jumped when a voice crackled from behind me. "Mister ... Um, I'm afraid I didn't catch your name." I spun around. Dr. Iona Friel stood facing me at the big window with calm concern in her eyes. Her wire-framed glasses rode low on her nose.

I said, "Oh. Um. I'm Rik Fernandez."

She raised a hand in a "stop" gesture and a small attempt at a smile flitted across her lips. "There are intercoms, but you have to press the button. I can't hear you until you do." Only then did I see the circular silver grilles, though they were super obvious, smack-dab in the window centers.

I jogged over and turned mine on. "Uh, Rik Fernandez." Then I jogged back and turned on the one on Trixie's side.

"Iona. Sorry about this. Precautionary. I didn't know you had a family." She had a made-for-radio voice. Very crisp.

When Trixie turned her head so that her good ear faced the intercom, I replied, "This is my sister Trixie."

"Hello, Trixie." The scientist waved across my bay. For a moment, warmth colored her eyes, but she soon resumed a sober expression. "Believe me, we shouldn't take any chances. When we realized you had visited the lab, we decided that caution should be our watchword. My colleagues are here in quarantine, too. The spilled virus had unique properties. We should respect that."

"It actually, uh, helps to see you here, Dr. Friel. Helps me take it seriously, I mean."

Trixie piped up, "What did you do, Rik?"

I fidgeted. "Well, I cleaned up some broken glass. I guess it ... I dunno."

Dr. Friel saved me with an articulate summary. "The test tube that dropped contained an experimental synthetic virus called KGZ-56. It was probably inert. A complete dud. However, there is a chance that some of it was viable. On that chance, we are quarantined."

I tried a disarming shrug toward Trixie. "There you have it."

She narrowed her eyes. Not at me. At the good doctor. "What's the worst case?"

Dr. Friel swallowed. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "All right. You deserve to know. The synthetic strain was based on a particularly fast-acting variety of anthrax."

My stomach clenched with dread at the word. "Anthrax!"

The virologist winced. "Yes, to be fast-acting. If there are harmful effects from KGZ-56, and let me stress that it is almost certainly harmless, but if there are harmful effects we should know it very soon."

Trixie and I spoke simultaneously. I said, "So I won't miss much work, eh?" She said, "Why did you engineer it to be fast?"

Iona Friel pursed her lips. "Don't tell my competitors, all right? But the idea is to use the virus itself as a vector for distributing a beneficial peptide. That is, a drug. Suppose you're a diabetic and you need insulin. If you had a virus that made, simultaneously, more viruses and some insulin, then, well, you're close to a cure. One shot and you're permanently back to normal insulin levels. At least, as long as the virus continues to replicate."

Dr. Friel wasn't much to look at, but when she described her dream, a certain light seemed to glow in her bland face. Her voice grew more vibrant, too. It found it remarkable. She waved her hand in a vague gesture of erasure. "But we're not that far along. The peptide sequence it carries, if it even works, is random."

Supper came, through the airlock, delivered by a blobby something (presumably a human nurse) covered from top to toe in rubber and plastic. Trixie and I discovered that we had TVs. That sparked a flurry of channel-flipping. I couldn't afford TV service at home, so this was a treat. Each commercial sucked me in. If I drank a certain brand of beer, I would gain fun friends, including attractive ones with bedroom eyes. If I bought that car, I could exceed the speed limit on scenic roads and then attend parties dressed in a tuxedo. And attractive women with bedroom eyes would find me intriguing. Even if I bought insurance, whatever that is, I would become wise and wealthy. I did fervently wish to be wealthy.

Soon, though, I became uncomfortably self-aware about all of this. I felt myself responding to the emotional traps and it alarmed me. I felt dirtied. Off went the TV.

Dr. Friel closed her curtains and turned off her intercom. Trixie, too, began nesting.

Me? My body was just gearing up for the night shift. No way I was going to sleep any time soon. I lay on the plastic bed and studied the light fixtures.

My jaw ached. And I felt feverish.

And I started seeing things.