Eight Minutes, Thirty-Two Seconds Read online

  An alarm went off.

  “Medical emergency, please respond.”

  “I’m here.” She bit her tongue and the words slurred.

  “Initiating analgesic triage.”

  The pod tilted, sensor array burning against her skin. Her heart slowed, and the alarm silenced.

  L took long deep breaths, trying to remember who she’d been. “What happened?”

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Medical protocol dictated introduction of a cardiac anti-arrhythmic to stabilize heart rate.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Side effects of this injection may include, but are not limited to, trouble breathing, swelling of the face, tongue or throat, nausea, loss of appetite—”

  “Enough.” L pulled the sensor array off her skin. The medpod shifted to its original position and she stood.

  Staggered against the wall.

  “Dizziness and lightheadedness.”

  “I said, enough.” She searched for her notebook, found it in the base of the pod.

  “Something with a ‘k,” she said, smacking the pen against her forehead. As usual, it failed to help her remember. “How is he?”

  “All systems operating within recommended stasis parameters.”

  L walked to Stephanie’s room, reading the information they’d collected, trying to remember what she remembered needing to remember.

  “K, it had a ‘k’ in it.”

  “Would you like a list of all words with the letter ‘k’ in them? The Oxford English Dictionary contains more than 250,000 distinct words, not including technical and scientific words.”

  “No, definitely not. Just be quiet.”

  L closed her eyes, trying to take deep breaths despite the hunger gnawing at her and the lingering dizziness from the medicine and the climb upstairs.

  Stephanie, she’d been Stephanie.

  He’d punched her. She remembered the punch, burning into the back of her head. And the pizza. Cold, hurting her teeth.

  Then, nothing. No, not nothing.

  Everything.

  It had been everything.

  A ‘k’ in it. A nice ending sound, yacht or something. Professional sounding, one of those technical and scientific words. “Pro, with a ‘k’ in it.”

  “Poker?” the computer asked.

  “It was ‘pro’ not ‘po.’”

  “Sergie Prokofiev was a Russian composer, born April 23, 1891.”

  “No.”

  “Pro-k-yacht something or other.” She smacked the notebook against her face.

  “A prokaryote is a single-celled organism that lacks a membrane-bound nucleus, mitochondria, or any other membrane-bound organelle.”

  L spun so fast the room dimmed, the walls out of focus for a moment. “Yes, yes, that was it. Prokaryote. And virus. Something stable.

  “Prokaryotes have a larger surface area to volume ratio, giving them a higher metabolic rate than eukaryotes and a higher growth rate. Due to their shorter generation time, they are subject to increased mutations. The only information on ‘prokaryote’ and ‘virus’ in accessible databases are classifications for virions, ebolaviruses, and single stranded RNA genomes.”

  “What’s a virion?”

  “A virion is the complete, infective form of a virus outside a host cell.”

  She tapped her pen against her teeth. “And ebolavirus?”

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases.”

  “What information do you have?”

  “The root, ‘Ebola,’ appears in the term ‘Ebola hemorrhagic fever.’ It is a viral hemorrhagic fever producing a death rate between twenty-five and ninety percent.”

  L sank to the floor. The room tilted around her. When she closed her eyes, the spinning image from Stephanie’s monitor flashed into memory. The words made more sense now, although the colorful molecule still seemed so alien.

  A small box had sat in the corner next to the image. L remembered and knew she’d never forget. Not again. Never again.

  Stephanie Romero

  Ebola Reconfiguration

  Version 25.11

  Airborne (Stable)

  Incubation: 14+/-hours

  99.76% Fatality

  Every so often, Levi attended school, kept his head down, hoped to be ignored. There was little point to it, but his mom had insisted, back when she was sober, that he needed to socialize. Somehow, the definition of socialize never included his victim status. The bullying had started in elementary school, when he’d spent the first day of first grade correcting the teacher. It had yet to stop.

  Despite Levi being picked on, M treasured school days. The crowds on the bus, the thousands of students living their lives, the lunch period spent hiding in the quad, with the sun shining and birds chirping. Life. Everything so alive.

  Everyone alive.

  Today was the day. He’d known it the moment Levi showered before starting his air-gapped computer. The spreadsheet more colorful than something so deadly deserved.

  Each of the six with their own color palette. Every column and row dense with instructions and logistics, plans within plans, supply lists, and deadlines. Always deadlines. Finish by this date, start the next step. Finish. Start. Finish. Start. Until ARMAGEDDON.

  Levi zoomed in until Step One filled the screen.

  M watched as if his own fingers manipulated the data on the screen, separating each participant into their own spreadsheet tabs, each tab into their own spreadsheet. Saved each one. Encoded it. Password protected them.

  He’d long since memorized the first page of Steps. There was no one to tell so he’d stopped trying to remember anymore.

  Levi copied the five files onto a flash drive, put it in his pocket, and left for school.

  Initiation day.

  M studied the students in the library, the way they flirted or talked or joked. The way they lived. Breathed. Enjoyed. Out the window, the trees finally beginning to burst with spring. Buds dotted the branches, and some early green leaves. Such a beautiful shade. Clouds rested against the blue sky like fluffy sprinkles on a world-spanning bowl of ice cream.

  So much life.

  Levi inserted the drive into the seventh computer near the far corner of the Baltimore City College High School library. Hacked his way through the school’s firewall, before opening an anonymous email server.

  He sent five emails. Signed off.

  Step One completed on schedule.

  T-minus three years and counting.

  “Time?” L asked when she woke. She’d fallen asleep sitting at the table in the cafeteria. After days eating in the infirmary near M’s pod, it felt lonelier eating alone than she cared to think about.

  “One hour, forty-three minutes.”

  “How long, before?”

  “Withdrawal symptoms began at twenty-nine hours, five minutes.”

  “Alert at twenty hours, please.”

  “Twenty hours and counting.”

  L studied the room, the white metal walls, and the numerous chairs and tables she and M never used. There’d only ever been the two of them. No need for all this space. Row after row of refrigerated drawers surrounded her, far too many of them empty. The nutrition pouches used and discarded.

  Something felt familiar about them, just on the tip of her tongue, but the thought stayed defiantly out of reach. The virus information far more important than whatever she’d forgotten.

  “Access secure databases.” A panel just like the one in the infirmary opened in the wall of the cafeteria.

  “DNA authorization required.”

  “Whose DNA?”

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases.”

  “There’s no more DNA.” L ran out of the room, ignoring the panel waiting for DNA that no longer existed. She kept running, past the infirmary to the vault that once stored so many yellow vials.

  She stared a
t all the empty shelves, entire empty units. “How many are left?”

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases.”

  All this time, afraid to know and now, when she asked, there was no answer to fear.

  L picked up a vial, holding it to the light to see the liquid swirl in the glass.

  “What is it?”

  “Each vial contains a mixture of sucrose, water, FD&C Yellow #5 tartrazine, Propofol, potassium chloride, and succinylcholine. Do you require the exact measurements?”

  “No,” she said, putting the vial aside. “What are they?”

  “Sugar water and coloring. Propofol is a short-acting medication that results in a decreased level of consciousness. Its uses include the initialization and maintenance of general anesthesia and sedation. It typically lasts five to ten minutes.”

  “Succinylcholine is a medication used to induce muscle relaxation and short-term paralysis,” the computer said. “Potassium chloride is a metal halide salt used to cause cardiac arrest for executions by lethal injection.”

  L took a step back. “Executions?”

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases.”

  Yellow vials reflected the fluorescent light. She walked, too quickly, from the room, leaving the vault far behind. Her heart beat against her ribs, fast, then slow. Exploring random corridors, lights flickered on when she entered and off after she left. Small labels on each door read out which vault was which, but she ignored all of them.

  She needed to save M. To save him, she needed answers. To get answers, she needed DNA. To get DNA, she needed answers.

  She laughed, to keep from crying.

  “Access secure databases.”

  “DNA authorization required.”

  “Whatever.”

  L walked to a door, waiting for it to open. Light flickered on an empty room.

  One after another, she found empty rooms. So many of them, and so many more levels still to explore.

  She stifled a yawn and returned to the infirmary, crawling into the medpod, clutching the vial she’d use to kill herself in a few hours.

  Every few days, every few weeks, every few months, a random email arrived. M read each one, dreading their arrival, hating the joy Levi felt every time he crossed off a Step. Each of his friends methodically completing their tasks.

  Step by Step, the puzzle pieces of the plan fell into place.

  Spring became summer and avoiding the bullies was easier, Levi hiding in his house without anyone bothering him. By the time school began, he’d already decided he wasn’t ever going again. Easy enough to hack the system. Besides, what did he need with a high school diploma?

  His first online graduate degree was from MIT in biological engineering, with a second from Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. Seemed a little late to worry about high school.

  The pimples cleared up, he lost weight simply because he rarely remembered to eat, and his pants had become three inches or so too short in the months since he’d last seen Cathy.

  M figured almost a year had passed since he’d become Levi. Felt like a year. Felt longer than that. Days melted together, that feeling of losing himself and only being Levi. He wasn’t Levi. He was M. He remembered L. He remembered ‘the end of the world.’

  Or perhaps he’d only had a vision of the future born from Levi working so diligently on the plan. ARMAGEDDON, the word lingered in his memory. Wiping out all the details he needed to remember to tell L, needing to tell her so much he’d forgotten half of what he wanted to tell her.

  When Cathy showed up after her first day of school, she stood closer to him than usual. “I have World History this year. Chemistry.” Cathy glanced at him, lips drawn into a frown. “Are you listening?”

  “World History. Chemistry. I know.” He’d already pulled her schedule, expecting her to stop by.

  She stepped even closer, trying to get his attention. “Why do you let them beat you up?”

  “It’s not a choice.”

  “You could fight back.”

  Levi inhaled her vanilla scent, for once looking in her eyes. Gold flecks sparkled in their deep brown depths. “I am.”

  L held the vial in her twitching hand. The tremors had started four minutes and seventeen seconds ago. An injector waited in her lap, the sensor array already attached. Her eyelids spasmed, rapidly blinking, and her legs refused to stay still.

  An alarm sounded. “Medical emergency, please respond.”

  “I’m fine,” L said through clenched teeth.

  One vicious seizure rattled the side of her head off the cushioned interior of the medpod. The ceiling faded out of focus. She inserted the vial into the injector, fumbling where it fit in her port.

  “I don’t want to die,” she said, right before killing herself.

  L was still shaking. Crying. Throwing things into the walls. Her voice far too deep.

  Billy slammed a motherboard against the desk. Pieces of plastic and metal shrapnel flew every which way. Another motherboard exploded, twisting between his fingers, as he took out his frustration on the already fried component.

  L tried to focus; ignoring the heaving sobs wracking Billy’s shoulders. A stack of motherboards tottered on the desk, streaked with fire stains or otherwise inoperable. Thousands of ram modules filled plastic bags covering half the floor. Only three computers though. They’d long since decided having their own server farm was too risky and not worth the expense, preferring instead to use a series of nodes Devid created to piggyback on public and private farms stretching around the world.

  Pulling a little CPU power from each linked computer to create something Billy almost considered true AI. It wasn’t, not even close. But far closer than anyone else on the planet had achieved. Closer every day.

  Levi only sent him two Steps. He’d located his particular Ground Zero within a couple of hours, letting the others worry about logistics and supply. Not his job.

  His first assigned Step simply to locate someplace suitable for their specific needs. They required a pre-existing structure, with room to grow and sizeable storage facilities capable of handling extreme and unexpected environmental and social conditions. The location needed to be secure, with state-of-the-art technology they could hack at will.

  It took Billy a little more than half a day to verify the Norwegian government’s seed vault would work, most of which consisted of him hacking the building’s operating system to cause entire levels of the structure to be re-designated “Storage-Six” for them to fill with whatever they wanted.

  Step Two, on the other hand.

  Almost two years, now. And nothing. Burning through money and motherboards and code faster than he was able to re-write the software.

  The emotional overload imprinted the room on L, but she saw nothing unusual. Nothing to learn. It was just a room.

  Piles of clothes strewn about, mostly buried under the scattered corpses of computers. Three monitors hung from the wall. One attached to the air-gapped computer while the other two scrolled through millions of lines of code faster than the human eye could follow, searching for the flaw.

  One flaw. A year ago, hundreds of thousands of flaws. Day by day, Billy fixed each one. The painstaking work consisted of trying to find a single needle in a million haystacks composed solely of needles. But now it should work. And it didn’t.

  He threw another motherboard, harder so it broke louder and into more pieces.

  Someone knocked.

  L waited for Billy to calm, willing him to calm.

  “What?”

  “Almost time to leave,” a woman’s voice said from the other side of the door.

  Billy studied the monitors. “I’m not going.”

  The door opened. “You don’t have a choice,” she said, holding out a hanger to him. A black robe hung there, flat cap tilting off the top. “You have a speech to give.”

  He spun around in his chair, sending the stacked motherboards crashing
to the carpeting. “No one cares what I have to say about the future.”

  “You worked hard to be valedictorian, Billy,” she said, making her way through the mess until she shoved the robe into his hands. “Your girlfriend is downstairs waiting for you with your dad, your grandparents, and a number of cousins you haven’t seen in years. We all care what you have to say about the future.”

  “There’s not going to be a future,” Billy said, trying on the cap. “That’s the entirety of my speech.”

  “You’re not going on one of your ‘humans are killing the planet’ rants at graduation. That’s what college is for.” She picked up the papers scattered across the floor and put them in numerical order. “Here’s the speech you wrote, they’ll love it.”

  “I like my new speech better.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  L wanted to shake some sense into these people, but no one heard her, no one cared. Nothing to remember here, just so much to forget.

  “Clear.”

  Levi turned fifteen on a dark, quiet night. He hadn’t attended school in months and no one mentioned it. A year or so since his mother ran off with a dealer, not bothering to say goodbye. Least, he thought she’d run off. Thought he’d been a dealer. Didn’t matter much.

  He hacked the utilities, kept them paid. Hacked grocery delivery services, kept himself fed. Hacked so many banks and credit unions and the like he’d completely lost track of how much money he had access to.

  An email would arrive from one of the six with a request, needing a four-figure microscope or a five-figure portable blood-testing device or a six-figure bio-containment unit. Simply a matter of hacking the supply chain, hiding the trail of purchases. Through multiple shell corporations, he’d hired a company to turn Yasmeen’s bedroom into a negative pressure clean room. He hacked international supply chains to provide HAZMAT suits made in Russia and centrifuges from China.

  M studied each purchase, unable to not pay attention. Nothing for him to do but observe. He felt trapped in the middle of a three-year movie, knowing the end but with no way to keep the tragedy from happening.

  Eight billion people. He reveled in the masses of them, whether on TV the few times Levi turned it on. Or out the window, listening to energetic kids playing on the sidewalk during the day and teens selling drugs at night.