“What database? The Air Force Personnel database would only show my service record and my retirement. You said ‘high moral index’ at my house too…”
Then it came to him.
“Oh, that slimy bastard. My shrink, Benchman. He collaborated. Turned over my medical records – broke his oath and my confidentiality. I should never have trusted him, I should have done what everyone in the service that wants to avoid trouble does, stay away from the psychiatrists. And…you saw my psych record too, didn’t you?” He suddenly knew he was right – knew now why she seemed to know him back then.
She hung her head. “Yes, I saw your file. I’m sorry, it wasn’t like I could refuse their orders. I just know they picked you out of some kind of pool of candidates. Then Jenkins said he’d do the recruiting, claimed he had the perfect approach. He came and got me, twisted my arm, you know the rest.”
“That approach got him killed.” Daniel mulled that over, ran the checklist of open items in his mind. “Hmm…back to what you said earlier. How could they overcome the conscience ‘problem’?” He asked this with faint sarcasm.
Elise pulled her hand away and crossed her arms before answering. “Doctor Durgan had some ideas. He got drunk and bragged to me once. Electroshock. Brain surgery. Personality conditioning techniques, drugs…it might be possible. Eden Plague is subtle and gentle by comparison. It shapes you with a kind of aversion therapy. The more harmful you yourself believe what you are doing is, the harder it will be to do. It’s based on your own basic beliefs about right and wrong. So you can perform surgery if you believe you are helping someone, but you can’t make those same cuts if you believe you are killing them. Unless you think the killing is morally right. Sincerely righteous.”
He thought for a moment, then asked another question. “One of you said most people infected would act better with emotional and mental health improvement…what about the other fraction?”
He felt Elise tense up beside him, and he looked at her. She dropped her eyes. “There are genetic wild cards, unpredictable effects. The EP isn’t perfect, and…maybe even a perfected EP wouldn’t fix everyone. Human brains and minds are just too complex. Our models predict some people, maybe people who are already mentally ill, psychopaths or sociopaths, wouldn’t be cured. The ones with no sense of right and wrong at all. Very few, but if millions were infected…”
Daniel went cold as he digested that. “So…if you genuinely believe killing someone was good for everyone…even the target…you could do it? Like a jihadist who believes he’s doing God’s will?”
Elise nodded. “I think so…it’s all theory right now.”
“Another downside. We’re playing with dynamite here.” Daniel mused aloud. “So we could end up with some kind of amoral superman in charge of the uninfected fearful masses, claiming to ‘protect’ them. That’s always the way people accumulate power. They claim patriotism; they say they are providing security. Play on people’s fear. Stalin did it, Hitler did it, and Mao. Though they didn’t follow it up with mass murder, McCarthy did it in the fifties and Cheney did it after 9/11. And whoever arises would be a true believer! Maybe someone who really thought he was helping people by enslaving them, and killing us Edens. With all the EP’s physiological advantages. Self-righteous psychopaths…it could make the Holocaust look mild by comparison.”
Elise looked into Daniel’s eyes, deliberately reached out to take his hands in hers. She shook them in time with her words. “I don’t know. I just – don’t – know.” Her eyes flicked toward Skull, in the front seat.
He forced his own away. Skull had been a sniper. Not that they were all bad, or even most, but a significant minority of snipers had serious problems coming back from war. Drawing a cold bead on enemy combatants, ending life after life from an impersonal distance, had to take a toll…unless he was already suited for it by a certain personality quirk. Unless he secretly liked it. Skull had wanted to execute the INS security, he’d wanted to liquidate the scientists…and he’d put a gun to Daniel’s chest.
Daniel wondered what would happen if Skull got infected. Which way would his tightly-wound psyche turn? How long would he keep following Zeke’s orders? What if he decided Zeke wasn’t himself anymore, with the Eden Plague in him?
It was the same excuse uninfected humanity would use for wiping them out, or cutting their brains up, he realized. They would say the infectees weren’t human anymore, and that would justify a whole legion of new Doctor Mengeles, the Nazi concentration camp experimenter. The others would say their will was not their own, that they were some kind of monsters, when in reality, they were the monsters.
All you had to do was take a visit to Dachau or Auschwitz or Srebrenica to see what kind of monsters humans could be. Humanity had always been brutally selfish; one slip, trip and fall away from lynch-mob violence, from downright evil. It wouldn’t take much of a breakdown in society to push them all across that line.
Because the non-Edens were now the weaker species, so they would be afraid of Plague carriers, he realized. That fear would push them into it. When people feared something they hated it and wanted to destroy it.
Daniel didn’t think the Eden Plague compromised his free will. It didn’t stop him being human. No more than being in love – with Elise? – or hating someone or being afraid or winning the lottery did. It was just one more piece of life. But once they got where they were going, things in their makeshift army might fall apart. The center might not hold. The fate of humanity might rest on just how this little group, these nine people, handled the next few days.
Daniel looked in Elise’s eyes and saw she was thinking thoughts in line with his.
Just then a cell phone rang.
Everyone looked around in confusion. A babble of voices came over the net.
“Shut up!” Zeke roared. “Where is it?”
Elise pulled the offending instrument out of a pocket. “I took it off of Karl…the guy that tried to shoot us.” She looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, I forgot until now!”
Daniel grabbed it, still ringing. He looked at the incoming number, pulled out a marker, and wrote it on his arm. Then he opened it up, pulled the battery and sim card out. “Just a minute…” He wiped their prints off it, then waited for the next overpass. Then threw the whole mess out and down at speed.
“Vinny, I took the caller’s number. If I use a disposable phone to call it, and they have a trace ready, how long do I have?”
Vinny answered, “At least thirty seconds, maybe a minute. After that, they will know what wireless cell you are calling from, which will snapshot our position within a couple of miles.”
“Thanks.” Daniel put the battery in his last disposable phone, sat there thinking about what to say. Then dialed. “Someone call out at five second intervals please.”
Ring.
“Jenkins.” A middle-aged male voice, rich, self-assured.
Daniel’s brain stuttered. He swallowed. He hoped he was wrong.
“Mister Jervis Andrew Jenkins the Third?” He asked.
“FIVE.”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Sir…I’m sorry about your son. I apologize for my part in his death.”
A silence.
“TEN.”
“Markis? Daniel Markis? You have to come in. Everything depends on it.”
“Mister Jenkins, we have the Plagues. Both of them. Leave us alone. I can’t let them be used for what you want.”
“FIFTEEN.”
“What is it that I want?” he asked with forced amusement.