Let me tell you, though. It sneaks up on you.
It was the spore, man. Manhattan Path, Softball Syndrome, any of a dozen names I must’ve heard down there. It seemed to like mouths and eyes and open wounds, any wet tissue. I saw one poor fucker who’d literally been ripped in half, right down the middle; those buboes and filaments—mycelia, is that the word?—they were just boiling out of him in a kind of avalanche, right about where his lungs would’ve been. And I remember thinking, Brother, I hope that shit got into you after you died, because slow suffocation cannot be a fun way to go.
And of course not all of them were dead, not completely, not yet. Some of them still moved a little; a twitching leg, a muscle tic tugging pulling at the fingers. Or maybe they weren’t alive, either, maybe I wasn’t seeing anything more than the kick of a dead frog’s leg when you hook it up to a battery. Maybe the spore just short-circuited their motor nerves and left them twitching and jiggling until the last cell ran out of juice. I can hope, right? Anyway, I’m a tough boy. I can take it.
But you want to know what I almost couldn’t take, what fucked me up even worse than Sri Lanka? It was their faces. The ones that still had faces, anyway.
So many of them were smiling.
Yeah. Sorry. Kind of faded out there. What do you call it? Fugue state.
You get used to it.
Anyway, I’m only out of Battery Park for a few minutes before I hear this voice in my head: “Hey, Prophet? You there, bra? Come back.” And my first instinct is to duck and cover because all the comm I’ve intercepted up to this point has been decidedly unfuckingfriendly, if you know what I mean. So it takes a second before I realize that this isn’t someone talking about fragging my ass, this is someone hailing me. “Hey, Prophet? You there, bra? Come back.”
—but it’s loud enough to bring me back to the tumbledown canyons of Manhattan, which is just as well because this is no place to be lost in a psychotic hallucination even if you are wearing NANOSUIT 2.0 FROM CN COMBAT SOLUTIONS. A shout and a blink and I’m back in the here-and-now.
“Prophet? It’s Gould, man. Come back.”
Gould? Gould! Hey, man, I’m looking for you. Got a message for you from—
“The whole damn link went down, man, you were completely off the grid for almost four hours. I don’t know if the prototype’s glitching out or if someone blocked the freq. Any signal-jamming going on in your neighborhood?” I can’t answer. I don’t have to: “Never mind, just get to the lab as fast as you can, man, things are seriously turning to shit up here. Infected all over the place, poor bastards. CryNet are out on the cull. I even saw a couple of Ceph on the way over here. Look, if you’re anyplace in the downtown, stick to the subways. It’s gotta be safer than the streets. Hope you brought those marines.”
And maybe someone is jamming the spectrum, because Gould’s icon stutters to DISCONNECT and disappears. That magical hexagon compass is still hanging there in v-space, though, and as I watch it shakes itself free of whatever South Street tree fort it was reeling me toward and locks onto a new destination a few klicks to the northwest. Converted warehouse, judging from the wireframe. Must be Gould’s lab. He mentions it with a wave of the hand, and SECOND updates its waypoints.
I’m a little bit scared at how smart this thing seems to be. This thing I’m inside. That’s inside me.
I don’t make it more than a couple of blocks before I run into another batch of infectees. These ones are definitely alive; they’re walking, or trying to. Half a dozen of them. One’s crawling on all fours, barely keeping up. Another’s still on two legs, but one of her feet’s been blown off and she’s hobbling along on the stump of an ankle. Somehow they know where they’re going, somehow they’ve agreed on a direction. I don’t know how some of them can even see with those tapioca tumors eating out their eyes.
And some of them are freaking out, I hear one chick muttering about bad drugs and some other guy’s screaming this isn’t me this isn’t me this isn’t me but so many of the others are smiling again, those crazy fucking smiles, sometimes they just grin but sometimes their lips split wide open in this kind of obscene ecstatic laugh and you can’t even see their teeth for all the squirming rot in their mouths. They’re murmuring to each other, or to God or something, they’re talking about the light, the light, and Lord, take me. The suit’s got this heuristic threat-recognition software but it’s not lighting them up. I keep my shotgun raised anyway, just in case. False Prophet pipes up with some shit about stage-four infection and cellular autolysis and I almost blow them away anyhow—not out of fear you understand, not because they’re a threat, but as an act of mercy because sweet smoking Jesus, no one should have to go out like that. But then again, they don’t seem to be suffering, and something’s telling me I should probably conserve my ammo.
That was probably just me. Might’ve been the suit, I suppose.
Back then, it was a lot easier to tell the difference.
Executive Summary UNPS- 25B/23: Charybdis Epidemiological Agent 01
Timestamp: 1501 23/08/2023
Authorship: UNPS
Distribution: CSIRA, FEMA, UN (HoD: Eyes Only)
Key Phrases: EID, “Extinction Level Event,” “God Module,” “Green Death,” Charybdis, pilgrim, “Religious Impulse,” Wanderlust
Jurisdiction: US/WestHem Economic Alliance
Threat ID: GrEp Ag- 01 (UNPS designation: common names inc. “spore,” “God Bug,” “Softball Syndrome,” “RapCer,” others)
Threat Category: Weaponised Biological
Threat Summary:
Taxonomy: Awaiting classification.
Origin: Unknown (extrasolar): see UNPS-25A/23: “Charybdis,”
Description: Engineered agenetic bioweapon, monogenerational saprophyte.
Tentative Life Cycle and Epidemiology: Dispersal phase resembles a radially ridged spore 0.1–1.5mm in diameter; released by “Charybdis Spires” common throughout the MIZ. Initial dispersal is ballistic/explosive with an effective launch radius of 50–60m. Subsequent dispersal is passive/windborne, and of limited range: the spore becomes biologically inert and noninfectious within three to five hours of release, effectively restricting its range to New York and its immediate environs.
Infectious spores settle and sprout on animal tissue, preferring moist membranes (eyes, respiratory tract) or open wounds. While they show at least some level of metabolic activity on all animal species tested to date, active proliferation appears limited to hominoid hosts. Humans, chimpanzees and gorillas are most vulnerable; the spore is debilitating but apparently nonlethal to orangutans, gibbons and Old World monkeys, although it may simply take longer for the agent to reach lethal levels in these taxa.* Tarsids, Omomyids and Old World monkeys appear to be relatively immune.
Upon taking root in a suitable host, the spore germinates into a filamentous mass that proliferates throughout the body and shows a special affinity for the myelinated cells of the central nervous system. Superficial physical symptoms during this phase are obvious and grotesquely disfiguring: The lymph nodes grow hyperbubonic, and abscesses erupt across the skin (white cell counts from extracted pus range as high as 200,000). These abscesses frequently present a slight greenish tinge due to the presence of pyocyanine (a pigment evidently introduced by the spore itself). A variety of fleshy protuberances also sprout from the body during this phase, preferentially but not exclusively from the body orifices; these range from filamentous rootlets of <1mm diameter to ropy tumourous structures several centimeters thick. These are chaotically vascularised, and consist of hypertrophied columnar cells. (The precise mechanisms underlying their metastasis are currently being explored.) While the breakdown of host tissue would prove ultimately fatal in any event, death usually results from more proximate causes such as physical constriction and/or occlusion of vital organs, or suffocation.