“What about the containers?” Daniel asked, impatient.
“All but one had human remains in them. One had a whole human head, a woman. The others held half-burned pieces of flesh. One of them had a smaller container inside, that had been opened but was still half-full of a purified virus-like organism in an inert matrix.”
“So that was the Eden Plague?” inquired Zeke.
“No, it was something else. But the human remains were contaminated with the Eden Plague.”
“What about the pure sample?” Daniel asked.
“Let me tell it in my own way, okay sweetie?”
Daniel sat back and twined his fingers in hers. She’d called him “sweetie.” He shut up, a stupid grin on his face. The grin faded as he thought further. He didn’t usually react this way to a woman, getting hyper-infatuated. Another side-effect of the Eden Plague? That plus the combat high? His mind worried at the question, like a dog with a bone.
Elise went on. “After a cursory analysis, it was obvious both plagues were never-before-seen stuff, something new. I reported everything to Durgan alone. Pretty soon the CDC informed me the project was being transferred to Durgan’s company under a privatization initiative. He offered me double what I was making, so I gave my notice right away. Actually I’d have done it for the same pay. I wanted to figure out what we had, and I was so grateful to just be alive I was ready to do almost anything he wanted.
“So pretty soon I started work at the brand-new lab on Watts Island, along with Roger and Arthur. The government seems to like islands, though technically it was the company’s facility. They can control islands better. We’ve been working there ever since. Almost five years.
“We started basic testing, deconstruction, gene sequencing on both viruses, plagues. We called them phages or plagues for want of a better term, since they were different from most other viruses. Durgan took our reports, helped a little in the lab, asked some smart questions, but we did all the work. He wouldn’t hire any technicians, so it went slower than it should have. I know now he was more concerned about secrecy than progress. I think he had some notion of cashing in on our discoveries, keeping them from his secret government masters.
“We got whatever gear we wanted. I hear they paid millions for the island, but the equipment cost ten times as much. More. Nothing but the best. DNA sequencers, electron microscopes, virus incubators, whatever we wanted. And they kept raising our pay, too. We worked like demons. That’s ironic; you’ll hear why soon.
“So you asked about the pure sample. It was a far simpler virus, or proto-virus, than the other. It acted like a phage, invading whatever cells we gave it and damaging them, but the effects were much more subtle than one would expect. In simple organisms it didn’t have much effect at all. In more complex organisms it degraded everything, every process, but it was very hit or miss, and didn’t seem like a big deal. I’m compressing years of study into minutes here, okay?
“Also, without getting too deep into why we thought so, it seemed like maybe this virus could be the evolutionary ancestor of all viruses. Virus Zero. So Arthur came up with an idea. We used some powerful modeling software to ‘back out’ the virus and its computed effects from living organisms. We ran the infection process backward in the computer, so to speak, undoing the damage this thing did on our model organisms, all the way up to people, to homo sapiens.
“You know what we got in our no-virus model? Incredibly healthy people, physically, mentally, emotionally. They were strong, they didn’t get sick, they didn’t get cancer, they didn’t develop mental illness. They had long life spans, at the theoretical limit of telomere degradation and cell division. A thousand years or more. Like Methuselah in the Bible.
“So imagine Earth before this thing arrived. With no viruses and no degrading effect of this plague, it would be Eden. Everything more healthy, everything in better balance. Then this plague showed up sometime during the last ten thousand years, before recorded human history but after the Ice Age.
“Maybe it evolved here, but I just don’t see how. I think it’s extraterrestrial. If anything can survive a naked journey through space to another planet, a virus could. It could be the result of a life-bearing planet being destroyed, the debris scattered through interstellar space carrying it. Or it could be sent from some aliens that wish us harm. What better way to attack another world on the cheap? Biological warfare, like smallpox blankets and the Indians, or plague corpses catapulted over the castle walls.”
Zeke broke in, “Maybe we should keep that to ourselves. People will say we’ve been infected by alien viruses and are not human any longer…like we’re pod people or something.”
That stopped Elise for a moment. “Yeah, right. Shut up about aliens. So anyway we – mostly Roger - made an extremely sophisticated computer model of our Eden, with humans and animals living in balance, with those long lifespans, with telomeres that didn’t degrade…everything we had learned by the virtual-undoing model. Then we introduced the virtual plague to see what would happen. We ran the infection model forward again.”
Elise took a deep breath. “It spread like wildfire, infecting everything. Living things degraded, subtly but thoroughly. The higher order the organism, the more it degraded. It affected humans most of all, promoting animalistic behavior.
“The plague left most host cells intact, but with a bunch of mutations and other damage to every system in the body. It shortened lifespans, made everyone stupider and weaker, more selfish, more violent, less altruistic and social in their behavior. It also boosted the fertility of both male and female, so it accelerated population explosions, competition for territory. Humans and animals both began overeating, overkilling, gorging on prey, overgrazing land and trees. Killing for sport. Fighting for territory, fighting over mating rights. They stopped cooperating. Humans started tribal wars. Everything just went to hell, hell on Earth, compared to what went before.”
She rubbed her face with both of her hands. “So we called it the Devil Plague. This devil corrupted our virtual Eden.”
Daniel’s mind whirled with the implications. Maybe those old stories had a grain of truth in them. The Devil was supposed to have come from Heaven to Earth, corrupting the Garden of Eden. This was the panspermia scenario’s evil twin; instead of a life-bearing meteorite jump-starting life, it damaged what was already here. He said, “So you believe this is what happened in the real world? Like the model?”
“Actually, yes,” she said. “It makes sense. But by this time Dr. Durgan thought we had a biological weapon we could use. We couldn’t convince him that it wouldn’t work that way. He thought we were holding out on him, so he assigned us those…commissars. Minders. Slave drivers. We couldn’t take vacations, or visit our families. He thought we were acting like those German nuclear scientists under the Nazis, the ones that slowed down their atomic bomb program…but we weren’t! We would have resisted if it really was a bio-weapon. Ironically, we were being punished for a moral choice we never had to make.”
“So it can’t be weaponized?” asked Vinny.
Arthur spoke up. “No, the Devil Plague wouldn’t do much to anyone now. It has done all the damage it was going to do more than ten thousand years ago. There is a kind of limit. It will only put so much of a load on the physiological system, and then it just stops replicating itself and goes inert. In fact, it’s everywhere even now. You can find it in everything in a dormant state, in low concentrations. It only flares up occasionally, almost at random. And it’s actually fairly easy to generate resistance. In the real world, we demonstrated that every eukaryotic organism on Earth has enough residual immunity to make it just a nuisance disease. No worse than a cold. It was a dead end, except as a research subject.”