06 - Viral
By Saïd
Translated from the French by Miguel Jacq
Julian had learned to ignore the engineers when they laughed at the side table, at the cafeteria. They were making fun of him, he knew it. He, the ‘biologist’ as they called him, as they they were incapable of remembering that he was a bioinformatician and far more qualified than most of them. But at the heart of the private spatial agency Neonova, like elsewhere, certain individuals took pleasure in laughing at the expense of others.
Julian decided to go back to work. He was unable to avoid the olive that they just threw at him. It stained his shirt.
“They’re really children”, said one of his colleagues, placing her tray back on the trolley.
She was a short brunette with a large forehead that he didn’t know. The number of departments was sufficiently high here that you discovered new colleagues every day. Julian responded:
“I’m used to it.”
She left and walked through the corridor with him. Her name was Elizabeth, but everyone called her Lisa. She was an astronaut, and was starting the final training session before being sent into space, next month.
They chatted as they walked, initially going in the same direction. They ended up passing by the entrance airlock of the wing where Julien was working, just as he was about to explain his work.
“I work here”, he said, pointing with his thumb at the door behind him.
“In the microbiology zone?”
“Yes. I work on the coding of information in DNA.”
“What does that mean?”
“I create artificial DNA in which information is encoded. I inject it in viruses, and with these viruses I contaminate bacteria.”
“And can we store much data in there, that way?”
“A lot.”
She smiled.
“How much, then?”
“It’s.. that’s classified…”
She told him she understood, then turned to go back to training.
Julian remained in the corridor for several seconds without moving, watching her walk away. Then he decided to return to his workstation.
The work of a bioinformatician required being equipped correctly, disinfected, and isolated. But Julian didn’t go back to the sensitive zone. Instead, he sat down behind his computer screen.
It had been days since he’d touched his viruses. He was looking first of all for a way to optimise DNA data encoding procedure. The figure that he hadn’t given to Lisa scared even him: in a single gram of a molecule, one could store more than two hundred petabytes of information. All that remained was to optimise the encoding technique, which had already been developed by several research teams. He still had a few hours ahead of him…
The next day, around 10am, Lisa found Julian at the cafeteria. He was in the middle of wiping the floor: he had forgotten to put a mug under the machine before making it pour a coffee. The night had been rough. When the bioinformatician stood back up, she saw huge bags under his eyes.
“Are you okay?” asked the astronaut.
He had been better, to be honest. Julian explained to Lisa that he thought he’d solved an algorithmic problem. He made himself a coffee – in the cup, this time – intending to go back to work, but she continued the conversation. Embarrassed, she suggested to him to go see a film, a preview screening. To her astonishment, Julian declined.
“I’m not really a film buff”, he explained.
“Ah, no?”
She didn’t seem to believe his excuse. He realised it.
“Come see.”
The scientist reached his office, followed by the astronaut.
“I mustn’t miss the training…”
“Don’t worry, it’ll only take a moment.”
Julian sat behind the computer, and tapped away on the keyboard. Then he turned the screen to her. It was incomprehensible.
“There, you’ve got the data”, he explained. “They’re coded in binary. Binary can represent anything. People, here, encode films. Their favorite film, every time. Millions and millions of copies of their favorite movie, stored in viral DNA… it depresses me.”
Lisa sat partially on the table which was covered in books.
“Why is that?” she asked. “To detect potential deterioration more quickly?”
“Not even! If the data deteriorates in the virus, that won’t affect the image, it’ll just render the file unreadable. So they don’t even need to fill it with the same images over and over.”
She nodded.
“I think I understand why you don’t like the cinema”, she said. “It must remind you of work.”
She got up to leave. Before she went, Julian said:
“Maybe… given that I’d be with you… in any case, I’d be thinking about work anyway… well, what I mean is…”
Lisa smiled. He continued:
“If you don’t have anyone else to go with to see the film…”
“Still no-one, no more than fifteen minutes ago. I’d love it if you could come, in fact!”
“It’s tomorrow, is that right?”
“Tomorrow night.”
They smiled in silence for a second. Eventually she said bye and left the room, but her head reappeared in the door frame almost immediately after.
“In fact, what is it that you encode, then, in the viruses?”
“Ah! I encode AMA.”
The name seemed to ring a bell.
“AMA? Isn’t that the archive…”
“All Mankind Archive. It’s the database that catalogues everything humans have produced as knowledge since we’ve been on Earth.”
“And… why do you encode that in the viruses?”
“Because that way, when decoding, I’m sure to learn something every day!”
Lisa smiled and left for real.
Julian continued his day far from his office, in the isolation zone. Behind the reflection of the smooth plexiglass mask that he wore over his protection goggles, with his arms stretched under the hood, he meticulously injected his artificial viruses with a pipette into vials containing floating host bacteria, which he then let reproduce in Petri dishes.
After several hours of work, Julian, still concentrating heavily, received a big slap on the back.
“Hey, Ju! Now’s not the moment to slip up!”
The two colleagues in their lab coats sniggered, bumping into Julian again, causing laboratory equipment to collide noisily.
“Very funny guys, really!”
He waited for the duo to disappear before cursing them behind his mask, then he kept working. Julian was relentless. In several months, he had injected the artificial viral DNA in bacteria almost every day. This week, he was running behind, and he fully intended to catch up.
The bioinformatician had encoded a famous series via the pipette when he decided to lift his head from his work. It was 8PM.
Julian sighed, left to undress, clean himself, and return to his office. It was then that he noticed that his damn colleagues had tampered with his computer. The screen, which translated the sequence of data into binary, was displaying several figures, for no reason:
“01100111 01110110 01100100 01100101 01100110 01110110 01100010 01110010 01110100 01110010 00100000 00111111”.
“What the hell are they doing, these idiots?” Julian asked out loud.
He erased the chain of characters and switched off everything behind him. He needed rest, but already knew that he would dream again of pipettes all night. His brain never stopped.
The scientist took advantage of the journey by autonomous car to sleep… no matter what he let show, managing to not think of Elizabeth took him a lot of effort.
Julian didn’t see that activists had painted a white strip across the road, causing his car to break suddenly. The swift movement, causing the tyres to skid, woke him with a jolt. When he saw the headlights of another car coming straight for him, he didn’t even have the reflex to cry out. Prisoner in his own vehicle, he was only able to do one thing: close his eyes and wait to see what happens.
“Can I open your door?”
“No, it’s ok, I can do it.”
“Are you sure? Would you not rather that I…”
“No, I can manage, it’s ok damnit!”
Arms trembling on his crutches, Julian advanced feebly to the door of his office. His right leg was in plaster. With his right hand, constrained by a splint, he managed to find the lock and unlock the door. He slipped inside and closed it in his colleague’s face.
Two weeks had passed since the accident. He had spent the first in hospital. Colleagues from the department, these hypocrites, had sent him a card, and now that he was back, they pretended to act like they were good friends. Ridiculous.
Julian ought to have taken more time to recover, but he had insisted to Neonova that he return to work as fast as possible, even in plaster. After two weeks, he wanted to see where the host bacteria, infected with his precious viruses, was at. When he turned on the computer, someone knocked on the door. He had to get back up painfully to open it. It was Lisa.
The astronaut had come to see him in hospital, then once at his place. They still got along well, but Julian, not exactly an extrovert, didn’t let anything show for the moment. Lisa respected his focus on work. She asked him:
“You’re picking back up where you left off, is that it?”
“Exactly”, he replied, tapping on the keyboard with irritation, “I’m discovering that these shitheads have once again tampered with something.”
The screen flashed several incomprehensible messages:
“01100001 01100001 01100001 01100001 01100001 01100001 01100001 01100001 01100001 01100001 01100001 01100001 01100001 01100001”. Then other similar messages of the same kind.
“I’m going to let you sort out your issues”, she said to him. “And I’m going to go back to training. Shall we see each other later? At noon, perhaps?”
“Yep, see you then.”
She went to close the door, but he interrupted her as she moved, saying:
“Leave it open, I’m going to go have a word next door.”
Julian stood back up, pressing on his crutches, and went to knock on the office door just to his right. His colleague Cyril opened it.
“Can you tell me which arsehole it was who touched my PC?”
He had never been so frank. Being messed up gave Julian the impression of being immune to an eventual punch in the face. No-one would dare hit a cripple.
“I.. I swear to you that no-one has entered your office, Ju.”
“Are you taking the piss? I know that someone went in there.”
“We don’t even have the key! Listen, we didn’t touch anything. The boss came to see us. Apparently, he had seen some stuff.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Well.. he may have noticed that we were taking the piss out of you at the cafeteria. Even though we explained to him that it was just a prank, that we were only joking, he flipped when you had your accident. He thought that it had something to do with it.”
Julian started to understand why the hypocrisy of his colleagues had increased. These idiots were scared for their job. Cyril continued:
“So I swear to you, given the circumstances, we haven’t moved a single part of your gear, we haven’t opened your office door either.”
Julian thanked him half-heartedlyand turned back. This story intrigued him. Back in his office, he cleaned his computer. He had to then go back to the isolation zone. Just the act of getting dressed, equipping himself took more than half an hour. He was finally able to recover several dishes and place them in the device that converted the sequence of data into binary. Prior to that, he made sure to clean this device too.
Returning to his office, Julian collapsed into his seat. He then launched his program, and read on the screen:
Without eyes we see you.
“What the..”
His colleagues must be playing a prank on him. The scientist verified the equipment’s parameters. Everything was in order. The message came from one of the samples in the machine, from a series of data. And it was absolutely not what it was supposed to read at this point. He continued interpreting the code:
Without a nose we smell you. Without a mouth we devour you.
Julian refused to believe the idea that was starting to form in his mind. Bacteria infected with the entirety of human knowledge, could they…
The scientist changed the analysis sample in the machine with a few clicks. He then read:
You have conceived us with your knowledge and that of others. It doesn’t matter if you measure us one by one or all at once. We carry the same message.*
Julian gulped. His heart was beating like mad. He read again:
We dominate you. We are your god. You are our host. You are our hostage.
No-one saw the scientist for the rest of the day.
Sitting in the taxi, with a small suitcase full of equipment, Julian was sweating profusely. His phone rang but he didn’t answer.
Arriving out the front of his place, he needed a bit of time to get out with his crutches. The autonomous taxi beeped with impatience.
“Yes alright, alright!”
He slammed the door, not without causing himself some pain, and went upstairs to lock himself in his apartment, dragging his baggage as best as he could. He had brought back several samples, some flasks, new pipettes, a few pairs of gloves and a more compact version of the lab machine. Connecting the device to his personal computer, preparing the equipment, he managed in a few tens of minutes to create himself a little work environment. As he produced his installation, he phoned the president of Neonova and explained that he would prefer to work from home, after all. He didn’t really leave him any choice.
Julian inhaled a big breath of air.
Here, his colleagues could not bug him. No-one could make him believe anything. No-one could encode personal messages into the DNA with the intention to scare him. He entered a text message on the keyboard, which his program translated into a sequence of nitrogenous data. It said: “How to believe you?” In the lab, the machine assembled the data itself, but the compact version that Julian had brought back only did half the job. He had to start the assembly by hand, then, without using a virus, he placed a drop of liquid containing his molecular message on the Petri dish, a dish that he slid into the device before scrutinising his machine.
Nothing happened. The series of ‘0’ and ‘1’ on the screen was exactly that which he expected, and nothing else.
Julian raised his eyes from his desk for a moment and asked himself what he was doing. He had to have fallen straight into a prank, or was going mad.
Suddenly he saw a figure flash up on the screen. It oscillated from zero to one. Then there was another, then another again. It was flashing everywhere.
“Oh shit…”
The screen froze. Julian used an automatic translator to convert the message.
We are inside you. You are going to get sick. Then, you will understand that you need to obey us.
Julian got up from the desk as fast as he could, half-tripping and hopping on one foot. “A mask!” he thought. “I should have been wearing a mask!”
It was too late. The night was terrible for Julian. Feverous, he was gripped by the shakes until morning. He vomited several times on the floor, unable to make it to the bathroom in time. For several days, he wasn’t able to eat nor drink. On the fourth day, trembling, considerably weak, he encoded a message to plead with the bacteria to not kill him.
How could they modify the DNA as fast as they were? How did they share the knowledge between them? How did they learn? For the moment, these questions – and the fact that they undoubtedly had an answer – terrified the scientist.
Obey us and you will live, said the return message.
“What must I do?”
You will be recovered tomorrow. Go back to work.
It seemed impossible to Julian that he could be in a state to do anything the next day. He was already relieved just to be able to breathe, and simply was hoping to be able to drink a bit. From there to returning to work…
And yet, the next morning, Julian woke up in his bed like after a migraine: feeling okay, but internally still a bit shaken. Caught in a bind, he had to get back to work, obeying the bacteria in which he had himself instilled not only their power, but also knowledge.
Once he was in his office, he entered into communication with his microscopic blackmailers.
The time has come. We must return to space. Send us aboard a vessel. We will populate the cosmos.
“I’m not an astronaut.”
In the time that it took the next message to arrive, Julian had already understood what it would no doubt say.
Remember. Without eyes, we see you. We are inside you. Transmit us.
The bacteria was talking about Lisa. They naturally were talking about Lisa, but he couldn’t put her in danger. He could still destroy all the bacteria, then leave to die alone himself.
“I can’t.”
You will die
“I am ready to die.”
We promise to leave all the humans safe and sound forever if you obey. Choose. Live, or die immediately.
Julien, who had only just started to muster the courage to respond to his colleagues’ teasing, couldn’t refuse. Later in the day, he met Lisa, talked about the movie they had missed due to his accident. That evening, they rescheduled the movie night. He only had two days left before leaving. Julien tried to be more friendly than usual. Lisa mistook his nervousness for clumsiness and found it endearing. She kissed him.
“I did what you asked!” he announced the same night, back home.
They knew already, in any case. They didn’t even respond. The nightmare was over, at last.
It took several days for Julian to dare return to work. He spent two days staring at his computer screen until he developed a headache, waiting for a message from the bacteria. Nothing came. He watched the broadcast of the shuttle launch that carried Lisa away from him… and the beings carrying his virus with her.
“That’s it”, he said aloud, alone in his apartment. “Extraterrestrial life exists, and I’m the one who fucking created it.”
At the office, Julian downloaded a film at random, which he encoded from now on in bulk into his viruses. He didn’t encounter anyone, and tried not to talk to anyone all morning. The department seemed empty.
At the lunch break, Julian noted that no engineer was present. He didn’t have much time to reflect on it. The president of Neonova came to speak to him. It took Julien a good second to realise what he was being told.
“I… I beg your pardon?”
“All of your colleagues are ill. I don’t know what they all ate together, but if they didn’t invite you, that’s a good thing!”
Julian had a bad feeling.
“And the engineers..?”
“Well it’s funny, a shocking gastro for them too!”
“Sorry.. I need to go.”
Julian fell to the floor. The crutches clattered on the ground with a loud fracas.
The president helped him get back up.
“Thanks… but I really need to go.”
Julian made his way as fast as he could in the direction of his office. Halfway there, he paused as he noticed a crowd gathering around a screen. Several of the workers present were crying. Everyone looked staggered.
“What’s going on?” Julian asked.
“It’s the shuttle”, someone explained to him in a trembling voice. “It arrived at the station… everyone was dead inside, it’s awful!”
“Oh no… Lisa.”
Julian almost ran on his plaster. He arrived at his desk, mad with rage, tears in his eyes, and coded:
“You promised me! Monsters!”
As he waited for the response to arrive, he phoned his colleague Cyril. No response. He must be dead. The engineers, the astronauts… everyone must be dead.
The screen finally flashed:
Your enemies are dead. Your lover is dead. You are now devoted to us.
“What are you going to do? What are you going to do with me?”
Space will be ours, but the Earth first of all.
Julian screamed. Desperate, he smashed a window with his crutch without leaving his desk. He tried to lean forward and fell to the floor. He grabbed a piece of glass the size of his hand. He wouldn’t remain the slave of these creatures for another second.
Gritting his teeth, his face covered in tears, Julian cut his wrists. He cried, lay down, and calmed himself. He saw that he was bleeding, a lot at first, then less and less. The hemorrhage was fading too quickly.
Julian glanced at his wounds: they were scarring over on their own, as if by magic. The scientist got back up to read the screen.
You will die at the right moment. In the meantime, we will make a god out of you.
He was trapped.