But her father had taught her well. The giant had a new heartbeat now.
“Let me save you this time,” Brishti said.
11
Vaccine Season
Hannu Rajaniemi
THE SMALL AUTONOMOUS BOAT SKIPPED OVER THE GRAY WAVES. THE ENGINE howled in mid-air with each jump. Every jarring landing made Torsti taste the protein bar he’d had for breakfast. The overpowering fish smell in the boat didn’t help.
For the thousandth time, he imagined what would happen when he arrived at his destination. He would jump out of the boat and run down the pier. His grandfather’s lanky form would reach down and embrace him. One shared breath and it would be done. Torsti would never have to be afraid of losing him again.
A cold spray on his face brought him back to the bucking boat. Jungfruholmen Island lay up ahead.
It was early autumn. From a distance, the blazing leaves of the trees made it seem like the island was on fire. The boat sped past the granite wave-breakers that guarded it, toward wave-polished coral-hued cliffs crowned with twisted birch and pine. A familiar pier jutted out of the stony half-moon of a beach.
In a few minutes, the boat bumped against the pier gently and came to a halt. Torsti climbed out carefully and secured his loaned vessel to a metal ring with a length of rope. There was no sign of Grandfather. The windows of the squat sauna building by the pier were dark. What if I am already too late? he thought. What if he is already dead?
A path covered in rotting leaves and pine needles wound into a patch of trees, up the cliff and toward Grandfather’s cottage. Torsti followed it, shivering in the wind.
The hiisi’s churn was just past the trees, in the middle of a large hollow. It was a gaping hole in the rock, fifteen feet in diameter. After a ten-foot drop, bottomless dark water lapped at the spiral-grooved walls. A stream of meltwater from a glacier had drilled it into the granite by rotating gravel, millions of years ago.
Torsti’s stomach tied itself into a cold knot. He had been five years old when he first came to the island with his parents to celebrate vaccine season. On a summer evening, with the red smear of the sun on the horizon, Grandfather had brought him to see the churn. In hushed tones, the old man had told him that the churn was actually an ancient portal to the stars. If you threw a rock into the spiraling grooves in just the right way, alien machines activated and opened a wormhole to wherever in space and time you wanted to go. He had closed Torsti’s fingers around a stone and told him to try.
Torsti had taken an eager step forward and looked into the churn. The vast depths had looked back, like the entire island was a monstrous eye and the churn its pupil, inhuman and black and fathomless, like Death itself. The stone had fallen from his hand and he had run away in tears. Even now, seven years later, he remembered the shame of it.
And I remember you, the churn seemed to say. I haven’t changed. I am the past. I am the future. I’ll get you in the end.
“No, you won’t,” Torsti muttered under his breath.
Branches rustled, and his heart jumped. A tall figure loomed on the other side of the churn. It wore dark overalls, gloves, and some kind of helmet. In the shadows, its face looked skull-like.
Then it stumbled on a pebble and set off a small avalanche into the depths of the churn. It let out a muffled curse in a familiar voice.
“Perkele,” Grandfather swore. He was wearing a battered face shield over a cloth mask, but his bushy eyebrows were unmistakable.
This is it, Torsti thought. He tried to will his legs to move, but the terror of the churn still held him in its grip.
Grandfather raised a hand. “Don’t try to come any closer, boy,” he said. “I mean it.”
Torsti stared at him helplessly. The old man huffed and adjusted his mask. This wasn’t going to work, he realized. The vaccine replicating in Torsti’s upper airways was engineered to be infectious, but just like the old Pandemic One virus it was based on, it still needed close contact to spread, especially outdoors.
Very slowly, Torsti took half a step forward.
“Stop right there,” Grandfather said, “or I’m going to run.” His voice was thin. It was hard to see his expression behind the mask and the plastic face shield, but his eyes were wide. He is afraid, Torsti thought. He has never been afraid of anything.
“I’m going to rest here for just a moment,” Grandfather said. “You stay right there.” He sat down on a boulder and massaged his leg, not taking his eyes off Torsti. “Did your mother send you?”
“No!” Torsti said. “Why are you dressed like that?”
“Well, I think it should be obvious. I don’t want to catch your damn vaccine, that’s why.”
“Why not?” That was the question that had been haunting Torsti for two years, ever since his mother had told him that they wouldn’t be visiting Grandfather during vaccine season anymore. He was surprised by how fierce his voice sounded. “Why did you stop talking to us? What did we do to you?”
Grandfather ignored him and took a phone from his pocket. He tapped at the screen laboriously—typically, he hadn’t had the opto interface infection either, and had to use all his devices by hand.
“Doesn’t look like you are shedding that much,” he muttered. “Thank goodness for kids’ immune systems.” Then he looked up, narrowing his eyes. “If your mother didn’t send you,” he said suspiciously, “then how did you get here?”
This wasn’t the Grandfather Torsti remembered from the vaccine seasons past, the one who had played hide and seek with him and built a castle from sticks and pine cones in the secret grove on the eastern tip of the island. This was someone else.
“I skipped school,” he said, swallowing back tears. “Then I took a train to Hanko. There was a fisherwoman Rnought introduced me to. She lent me her boat.”
“Why on earth would somebody do that? Who the hell is this Rnought?”
“It came out last year. It’s a serendipity AI to speed up vaccine spread. If you already caught the vaccine, it matches you up with people who want to be immunized and can help you with something, or the other way around.”
One of the benefits of living in Helsinki was catching every new vaccine days or even weeks earlier than the rest of the country, and Torsti had gone to the big launch party at the Senate Square with his parents. And the new vaccine was so popular that the fisherwoman had jumped at the chance of helping Torsti get to Jungfruholmen, in exchange for a verified transmission.
“Sending a twelve-year-old out to the sea on his own, just like that.” Grandfather said, shaking his head. “Everyone has gone mad. When I was your age, we couldn’t always trust the machines to save you. That’s what’s wrong with this world, it’s too safe.”
“No, it’s not,” Torsti said. “It’s not safe. People still get old. People can still die.”
“Unless they get this bloody vaccine, is that it? A vaccine against death?”
It wasn’t a fix for death, not really. Torsti knew as much. But it was the next best thing. It was the last in the long series of vaccines the Global Immunity Foundation had been releasing for decades. Backed by a group of billionaires, they had invented transmissible vaccines to stop Pandemic One—a controversial move at the time, but necessary when more than half of Americans and countless others around the world had refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19. After an initial uproar, the Foundation had been hailed as heroes after they stopped Pandemic Two in its tracks, saving countless lives. In the two decades since, the Foundation’s vaccine releases had been coming out on a regular basis: first, updates against emerging coronaviruses, flu, dengue, pre-pandemic zoonotics. And eventually, protection from the big ones, non-transmissible diseases—heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer.