Eternal Virus – Steve Stanton

Eternal Virus

by Steve Stanton

Her house had been locked all day. Of that, Niko could be certain. She had standard webcam surveillance, touch-sensitive alarms, failsafe measures. She lived in suburbia, a single girl safely ensconced in the anonymity of urban sprawl, her illegal nest impregnable to all but the most violent means of forced entry, her vigilance meticulous. There was absolutely no way anyone could have infiltrated the perimeter without her knowledge.

A shock of paranoia carved through her consciousness as she returned home late in the afternoon with a backpack full of groceries. A faint glow emanated from the front window. Niko had not left any lights on; she never did. Electricity was too precious. Her alarm network and communications were solar powered. When she was out during the day, the system fed power back to the grid for brownout points. The front door was secure. She zoomed in with optical magnification in search of fingerprints or smudges on the handle. She checked for minute scratches around the locking mechanism. No sign of tampering.

Niko unlocked the door with a palm sensor and stepped quietly inside. She froze and listened for a few moments, dialling up frequency augmentation to her upper limit, but could sense nothing but her quickened heartbeat and a housefly in a washroom down the hall to her left. She crept forward carefully, catlike, sniffing the air for anything untoward. A whiff of ozone tainted the air.

A glowing vial was sitting on her coffee table in the living room, a bright white beacon with a subtle greenish tinge. Niko dropped her backpack and sat down with a thump as recognition dawned. This was the Eternal virus! This was the magic elixir, right here in her suburban hideaway. Panic pushed up into her throat. No way. She stared, not daring to touch it, her mind reeling with possibilities. Could her cousin Rix have sent it from the Eternal Research Institute? Some lab experiment? No way. There was no human technology available to transport the virus into a locked room. And besides, this was no diluted lab specimen. This was an activated sample, bright and vital. This was the real deal right from the Source. She could think of no other explanation. Her stomach began to churn.

Niko took her groceries to the kitchen, steady on her feet. She minced a veggie shake and downed it slowly, she put some cheese and fresh fruit in the fridge, a loaf of bread in the cupboard, trying to organize her thoughts against a tide of confusion. Her life would never be the same. The alien virus, the most sought-after treasure in the civilized world, right here in her living room. Eternal life.

What a rush.

Okay, calm down. She was on her own now. Rix had been swallowed up by the ERI, newly Eternal himself. Perhaps she could contact him, suss it out somehow. His father, Zak, had journeyed off-planet to find an activated sample for his only son, had sacrificed his own memories along the way and who knew what else?

Niko stalked back to her coffee table and picked up the bright trophy lying there. She eyed it carefully. The vial was shaped like an infinity symbol, two lobes with a narrow causeway in between. It felt warm, alive, smooth like glass, perhaps some alien plastic, and was designed to be broken at the weak point and upended on the tongue. In a recent lab experiment, the virus had been diluted a hundredfold and given to test subjects, but couldn’t produce a single successful contagion, except for Rix. Nor could it be transferred from person to person in any way. The transmission of the virus was the greatest biological mystery in the universe. Each activated sample was target specific to a single human host—in this case, to her alone. She had been chosen to live forever.

Niko tossed the vial to the table as though it was a burning ember.

No one could force her to accept the alien science, not while she lived and breathed. She had free will as always; she could still walk away and probably should. Viral contagion carried with it important obligations, both to other Eternals and the planetary environment in general—all that salvation of the world crap. She didn’t need the extra responsibility for sure. Her life was complicated enough already. A rare specimen like this would be worth a fortune to a rich but naïve buyer, or perhaps a research group with a new tack. She could retire on the proceeds and gulp veggie shakes on the beach in a tax-free haven for the rest of her days.

If she didn’t get killed for it first.

The gentle glow held her attention like a magnet. This was the chance of a lifetime, her one invitation to immortality. How could she throw it away?

Niko touched it with hesitant fingers. She held the vial to her eyes under full magnification and tipped it back and forth, looking for bubbles of air, for movement. It seemed completely uniform and unchanging. She could almost see through it, but the steady glow obscured her close inspection. A liquid or gel, she could not tell. Perhaps it was gaseous. She put it back down.

Why her? Why had the aliens chosen her for contagion? She was a clone, a criminal by birthright, a smuggler by trade, and although she liked to think she had a good working relationship with the law of the land, she was always working from the wrong side of the fence of legitimacy. She was not a good candidate for infinite largesse. Was she being set up? Some conspiracy? Niko began to pace, prowling her home like a panther, thinking.

She was not worthy of blessing, but who ever was? The Eternal virus was not a reward for good housekeeping. It was not payment, but promise. It was a free gift from the gods, but at what future cost? Niko fancied herself a cynic, protectively paranoid. She questioned every assumption as part of her daily business demeanor, an ingrained survival instinct. She trusted no authority. What might the aliens demand down the road for the regenerative powers of the virus? Were they puppeteers, uploading purpose into willing subjects, perhaps even subconscious cognition? After the mortal humans died off, would the aliens sweep in for complete planetary domination? Were they just biding their time, setting a grand stage over the centuries?

Only one way to find out.

Niko picked up the vial for a third time and cracked it in half. It popped with the sound of a broken light bulb and a whiff of spray wafted upward like smoke. She spilled a few drops, but poured the rest on her tongue without hesitation. It tasted like honey, rich and vibrant. Warmth trickled down her throat as she swallowed. The taste lingered and grew, reaching up into her sinus with tendrils of pleasure. She swallowed again, the sweetness now cloying.

The sensation spread into her lungs and up her spine. Niko felt giddy for a moment and wondered if the virus had breached the blood-brain barrier so quickly. She was committed now. No need to panic. She sat down on her cushioned loveseat and made herself comfortable. Her stomach began to roil.

Poison, her body told her. Time to vomit. She resisted the urge. Maybe the virus had decided she was a bad candidate after all. Maybe it was testing her, reading her mind. I will not serve you, she subvocalized. But she knew in her heart that she had already pledged her allegiance. The virus was the only game in town, the only promise of longevity available to her species. Chemical rejuve could only do so much and was absurdly expensive. Cosmetic surgery, gene juice, steroids—all these options paled against the regenerative power of the virus. She had made the right decision.

A tidal wave of well-being surged up from her diaphragm, pushing her up and back into her seat. Niko tensed with alarm but forced herself to relax. She lay back and closed her eyes as her body began to tingle, every cell alive and kicking. Mitochondria, she had read, the target vesicles of the virus. She had never felt her mitochondria before. The thought made her smile, and she realized with a start that she was already smiling, grinning with elation like a fool on drugs. She barked a laugh.

So this was it, joy like a river. Pretty cool.

Niko drifted, delirious with a strange sensation of invincibility. She was being actively regenerated by the aliens. She could feel it. She knew it from within, by some new form of communication, some intuitive power.

Her surveillance alarm chirped three quick signals from somewhere in the distance, and she swam up through layers of perception and cognition to reach surface awareness. She opened her eyes and checked her wrist monitor. Her webcam showed three men at her front door. Damn. Just when she was getting a good buzz.

Niko apped for a webcam zoom on the three figures to check for guns. Nothing obvious, but really who would pull a gun on the street in suburbia? She apped the time, 4:49 p.m. Soon there would be returning commuter traffic.

They weren’t dressed like cops but that didn’t mean much these days. And why three? One man at the door might be selling insurance or some other scam. Two might be selling religion. But three meant nothing but trouble. Three could be an interrogator with two witnesses, or a point man with backup. She had a bad feeling.

She apped for a full motion scan and got two hits in the backyard, focused her cameras. Damn. Two goons with trank rifles inside her perimeter. Double damn. These guys were corporate hirelings, a mercenary squad. They had come to collect her for some reason. Niko reeled through recent memory in search of an explanation. Why her? She was not in play at the moment. She was supposed to be on vacation. Who might want her captured or dead? Sure, she had made adversaries in the past, but never by direct intent. Competition was just a natural part of doing business, playing out a temporary role. Next month her enemies might be partners in crime. Why kill off a talented worker?

Niko jumped up and made her way to the half-garage where she stored her dirt bike. She shouldered the door ajar and checked her red beauty, started through her checklist as a knock sounded at the front door. At least they were being polite. Their delay in busting down the door would give her a good sense of the seriousness of her predicament, but she did not wait to clock them against the national average. She had an escape route for just such an occasion, a tunnel under her backyard that she and Rix had rigged and tested many times. A trap door on the edge of her property swung down on a five-second delay and served as a launch ramp onto the side street. She could be on the freeway in ninety seconds or off-road in the bush in three minutes.

Niko keyed her bike and kicked it to life as she pulled on her helmet. She gave it some throttle for quick heat and checked her wrist monitor. The goons had heard the noise and were looking toward the half-garage. One had pulled out a pistol.

Never mind, she would be gone in five. . .

She palmed a red plastic button on the wall and kicked into gear.

Four. . .three. . .

The bike accelerated down a dark tunnel underground and swerved back up into pitch black.

Two. . .one. . .

The trap door fell with a thin coat of sod overtop and Niko launched up the ramp into the open sky. The bike revved frictionless for a second and landed, spurting dirt and gravel as Niko gunned it down the side street. A projectile whistled past her head.

What an irony to be killed only minutes after becoming Eternal. She hated goons. Without conscience, they were automatons to duty. They were relentless, implacable. She could never go back home.

Niko downshifted and swerved around the first corner to get out of scope sight. Her bike screamed as she accelerated, and she barely noticed the spike line on the road as her front tire was instantly punctured. She hurtled up over the handlebars and felt a horrid weightlessness as she flew headfirst through the air. Asphalt came up quickly to meet her. She tucked and landed hard on the back of her helmet, tried to roll with it and slammed her spine flat on the pavement. She slid butt-first on her tailbone and shoulder blades and flayed her arms to regain stability.

A swirl of sparkles obscured her vision as she stared at the sky. Clouds, she thought as she tried to focus, to keep in the game. She reached up and pulled off her helmet, pushed it away. A rifle pointed into her face.

“Nice move, hotshot.”

Niko heard the voice but could not seem to locate the source. Every attempt to turn her head brought spasms in her neck like knife blades. Finally point-man came into view over her. “Are you damaged goods, or what?”

He was suntanned, thirtyish, wearing a black peaked cap, and collared shirt with a crosshatch pattern. His blue eyes studied her intently.

“My back,” she grunted. “What do you want with me?”

“You’re Eternal. We’re a collection agency.”

“Vampires?”

“A cosmetics firm, if you must know. Just lie still for a moment. We’ll wait for a stretcher while my team cleans up the evidence. You want to keep the bike? It looks pretty mangled.”

“Did you plant the virus in my condo? Hoping that I would take it?”

“Me? Hardly.” He shook his head. “It comes from the aliens.”

“How could you possibly know it was there?”

“Wormholes.” Point-man looked away, scanning for onlookers, keeping to business. He seemed satisfied and gave a complicated hand signal to a compatriot in the distance.

Niko called his attention back. “What do you mean?”

“We have geeks who monitor for wormholes. They give us the coordinates, we collect the goods. Teams of geeks, actually. Tachyons and some shit like that.”

“No way.”

“You got a better explanation, sweetheart?”

Niko tried to sit up and was rewarded with pain. She winced and pressed her lower lip between her teeth. Her left leg trembled.

“You just lie still, girl,” point-man cooed, his voice softening with empathy. “Don’t get us both in trouble for no good reason. You made your play, and a damn fine one it was too. Best I’ve seen. Almost like you knew we were coming.” He grinned, not bothering to point out the obvious, that only a criminal would have an underground escape route. “Anyway, you’ll be fine. Don’t worry. Your blood only gets top dollar for the first few weeks while the regeneration is strongest. Then you’ll be second-tier for a few months and depending on market conditions you might get out of the lab for an afternoon in the courtyard. After that, the virus will be just plain old street-level Eternal, good only for the black market and the snake-oil shysters. You’ll have the run of the prison.”

“You can’t kidnap me without a warrant!”

“Kidnap? That’s rich. You should have thought this through before getting hopped up, honey. You don’t have any rights now. You’re an evolutionary terrorist!”

A grey cube van pulled up beside them, no flashing lights, no markings, and a young medic jumped out.

“We need a neck brace and board for this one,” said point-man. “Careful with the merchandise. Drug her for transport.”

Niko could barely move her eyes because of incoming pain. Her brain was beginning to relax out of shock mode, finally letting reality have its cruel way. A plastic mask fell over her nose and mouth, and she struggled to turn her face away. Her neck was completely paralyzed, her spine like a rod of iron. She made a noise of agony between gritted teeth, but eventually had to take a breath.

Niko woke to find her head squeezed between foam pads, her left arm and shoulder solidly secured. She opened her eyes to see an IV bag dripping relentlessly above her. A female doctor stood beside the bed, still holding the syringe that had apparently brought her back to life. She wore standard hospital greens with a name tag: Lucy Itel. Brown hair cut short, brown eyes like searchlights.

“Where am I?”

The effort of talking seemed arduous, using all available energy. Niko had never felt so weak. There was no point in even trying to move, for nausea hovered over her like choking fog.

“You’re in a safe place. There is no need to worry. I’m Dr. Itel. I’m managing the clinic. We have a large staff, so don’t be alarmed at the changing faces around you.”

Memories came back to Niko, the goons with guns, the bike accident. She glanced down at the crook of her arm and saw the red tube snaking out of her skin. She groaned. “Vampires.”

Dr. Itel offered a professional smile, displaying perfect white teeth. “I woke you up to assure you of your safety. Your brainwave activity was alarmingly active for a sleep state. I was worried that you might be having night trauma.”

“You’re killing me,” Niko said.

“No, you’re far too valuable for that. They always take too much the first day, I know. I have spoken about this in committee many times.” She shrugged her helplessness in the face of mindless bureaucracy. “The connoisseurs pay extra.”

Niko groaned again. “I bet that’s what they said to George Washington the night they bled him to death.” She closed her eyes against a wave of dizziness. She felt withered and desiccated. God, they were draining her dry.

“I know it’s difficult the first few weeks. We’re pumping you with nutrients to compensate. Steroids, stimulants, the works. The standard regime is to take blood only at night while you sleep. You will be free to walk the grounds during the day. Three meals a day, media downloads.”

“I need to plug up.”

“Yes, I see you’re wired for Prime, but that won’t be possible. We have intranet into a vast library to satisfy your addiction. You’re not the first wirehead we’ve seen. But you do have some innovative cerebral modifications.” She checked her databoard. “Optical enhancement, biochips in the hippocampus, augmentation of the corpus callosum. . .and you don’t seem to have any digital dossier. No retinal print records, no health history or credit rating, no bank accounts. I’m looking forward to finding out more about you after you get stabilized.”

Niko felt like a laboratory mouse, trapped and broken, completely at the mercy of mad scientists from hell. Soon they would begin probing her brain, excising bits of tissue to monitor the sadistic result, just another illegal clone on the slab. She needed help. She had to plug up to the V-net, get back to basics. She felt the urge to vomit and made a feeble attempt. Imprisoned in this neck brace, she would probably choke on her own bile and die.

“Easy, easy,” Dr. Itel crooned and rubbed Niko’s forehead above the bridge of her nose. She reached over with her other hand and closed a valve in the bloodline. “That’s enough for now. I’ll take some heat for the moment. You’ve got two fractured vertebrae, but no permanent damage. You’re young and strong and have the physique of a gymnast. Your body is already regenerating with the virus. Don’t worry, you’ll live forever here.”

Steve Stanton is the author of The Bloodlight Chronicles series. His science fiction stories have been published in sixteen countries and a dozen languages. He currently serves as the President of SF Canada.

 

Eternal Virus - Steve Stanton, 3.5 out of 5 based on 11 ratings