Pete stared at the photograph of the barren island. The photograph was old, taken before his work there, before they’d carved out the airstrip and erected their tower. But he still recognized the kidney shape, the rocky bluff at the northern end, and the two flat buildings on the other side.
“I’m waiting for them to send me there,” said Strack. “Maybe they’ll send all of us, the whole team.”
“I’ve already been there,” Pete mumbled in shock.
“You have?” said Strack, confused. “When?”
Just then the door burst open and Harkness walked in, his blue suit immaculate, a broad smile on his face.
“Hello, team! What are you guys up to?”
“Defeating the enemy,” said Strack, turning back to his computer.
“Good,” said Harkness, failing to read the sarcasm. “I’ve got good news… they just doubled our funding. And they’re moving us across the hall to a bigger office, getting three more people on the team!”
“What happened?” said Pete.
“West Coast governors are freaking out. Two hundred people have died in San Diego this month.” He was beaming.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The new office reflected the rising importance of their project, with twice as many desks and even a small kitchen. The smells of fresh coffee and new carpet blended together pleasantly, along with the murmuring of the new team members, whose names Pete struggled to remember. Strack’s tattered world map had been replaced by a digital Mercator projection of the world that took up an entire wall, with red pinpoints of light to indicate flu hotspots. Harkness’s single flickering monitor had been replaced by a bank of six flat-screens against another wall, all of which he controlled and watched with rapt attention.
Pete came upon Harkness on one of those first days, watching the news on an Alliance-friendly channel as the anchor recited the dangers of the flu and the strides the Alliance was taking to defeat it. Pete was fascinated to see that Harkness was practically mouthing the words as she spoke, as if reading a script that he had written.
Pete watched for a few moments before speaking. “Do they…?”
“Work for us?” Harkness said matter-of-factly, not taking his eyes from the screen. “No, not anymore. We used to do that. But we found that the really fire-breathing Alliance guys in the media did a better job on their own. Honestly, they are purer and more driven to the party line than guys on our payroll were.”
In fact, the woman on the screen did stare at the camera with studied intensity as she spoke. She was blond with blue eyes, red lips, and teeth so white that they seemed almost predatory. She was stunningly beautiful. Harkness, pleased by Pete’s interest, grabbed a remote and turned up the volume so they could listen.
“Travelers returning from Hong Kong should be quarantined,” she said. “It’s just common sense. Our soldiers have to observe twenty-one days of isolation when returning from hot zones. If it’s good enough for them, why not for the rest of us?”
The camera turned to a tired-looking academic type who started to respond but was soon cut off by the gorgeous anchor.
“Here, look at this,” said Harkness, pointing to a screen right below the newscast. Against a black background, fifty words were jumbled together like a huge crossword puzzle, except all the words were changing in size and position. The biggest word, in large red letters in the middle of the screen, was FLU. Around it were dozens of associated words, like PANDEMIC, OUTBREAK, STOCKPILE, and INFECTION. Suddenly, HONG KONG appeared in small letters at the edge of the cluster. Harkness eagerly tapped the screen.
“There, see? It’s trending now.”
“Is this a representation of the words in her broadcast?”
“No,” said Harkness. “It’s all the terms associated with influenza discussions, across the whole Web. These are the top fifty words, so you can see Hong Kong just broke through.” As he spoke, the words grew bigger and moved closer to the center of the cluster.
“Just because she said it?”
Harkness shrugged. “It was trending before, we knew that. But it doesn’t hurt. A mention by her, on a broadcast like that, all the chattering voices want to chime in.”
“And that’s good for us?”
“Absolutely,” said Harkness, nodding vigorously. “We need people to be aware of the dangers, and these dangers necessitate quarantines.”
And quarantines have other uses, too, thought Pete. They allow people to be gathered up and locked away without trials or lawyers. They keep people afraid, and compliant. But he kept those thoughts to himself.
Pete stood there for a little longer, watching the cloud of words shift and change in front of them — there was something hypnotic about it, all these flu-related words moving around each other, forming patterns, growing and shrinking as the whole world tried to figure out what to do about the epidemic.
Harkness worked tirelessly as the epidemic spread, always carefully inserting the story of a potential cure. The war (and by implication, the enemy) had brought them the flu, the storyline went, but the Alliance would bring them the cure. For all his faults, he was the perfect man for the job, a relentless worker coupled with ruthless ambition. Pete soon learned how to read those screens along the wall, and saw that their work was having the desired effect, keeping people at once terrified and hopeful, and convinced that only the Alliance could save them.
While Harkness worked to create the mythology of the cure, Strack worked day and night, too, doing what he could to bring about an actual remedy. He had visualizations on his computer similar to Harkness’s, but instead of words and trending topics, Strack dealt with deaths and mortality rates, secondary infections and quarantines. His screens were more difficult to interpret than Harkness’s, but he assured Pete that despite whatever level of Alliance bullshit accompanied it, the flu was very much real. And, he said, for the time being, damn near unstoppable.
Pete looked closely at the sporadic communications he got from the rest of Strack’s extended team, especially those on Eris Island. The war was making it difficult to communicate, and impossible to get them the supplies they needed. Nonetheless, they were making progress on a cure, the reports said. Harkness dutifully sanitized the reports, elaborated where necessary, and published the results in their weekly meetings. Pete himself began presenting during his allotted five minutes, explaining how they were using their new resources, where the anticipated trouble spots were. He’d adopted Strack’s philosophy: they were curing a disease, and no matter what, that was a positive thing.
One morning, Pete came into their new, lavishly appointed office to find everyone hushed. Strack was standing at the front of the group, with Harkness at his side. He held a message in his hand in a red TOP SECRET folder.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” said Strack.
“What happened?”
“They did it,” said Strack, so quietly Pete could hardly hear him. “They’ve got the cure.”
“And it’s just in time,” said Harkness. “They’re evacuating the island.”
“What?” said Pete. “Why? That place is a fortress.”
“They’re almost starved out. We can’t get them supplies, and we’ve got intel that there might be enemy submarines in the area. Typhon puts commando teams on their subs, this is what they’re good at: raids, search-and-destroy missions. If they land a team on Eris Island, those researchers, and everything they’ve done, could be at risk.”