HUMANITY 2.0
YEAR 001, DAY 028
Emily's condition didn't get worse per se; instead, it seemed like she simply had less energy every hour until she was either sleeping or eating almost all the time. The retrovirus was at work, I knew, turning her into one of us, but I had no idea how long that would take. She kept telling me to leave and that she didn't want me to catch whatever it was, and I didn't quite want to have that conversation with her yet – of course, there was no possibility I could 'catch it'. It was my own body that created it.
Six days had passed and I had mostly spent my time in between caring for Emily with books or on the internet. My apartment wasn't far away, so it didn't long to drop in there to get changes of clothes and such. I saw John once in the interim, but only for a few minutes. He didn't seem to notice anything different about me.
Finally, after days of agonizing over whether or not I should do it, I decided. I picked up my cell and called Bethany. It rang a few times until I heard it pick up, something clattering loudly on the other end – probably the phone itself – then it being picked up again.
"Ben! Are you back yet? I need to see you."
"I just got back in half a day ago. What about?"
"I need you to tell me exactly what you were doing and where you did it before you got sick. Something is really fucked up about your DNA."
"Uh, okay." My mind raced. How much did she know now? And since when did she have such a foul mouth? "Is that the official medical term for it?"
"Sorry. Something is really unusual, and I can't figure it out. I mean, it's obviously not infectious, since, uhh..." She trailed off for a moment. My mind instantly wandered back to that first, amazing blowjob of my new life that she had given me. "Just come by my place and I'll show you."
I took a breath despite myself; she didn't know much, from the sound of it. "Your place? Not your office?"
"I don't have an office right now. I've been working out of my house. I'll text the address to you again if you don't have my card. You need to see all this and we need to decide what to do next."
I followed the directions, but was worried the whole time that Bethany had found me out and reported my impossible DNA to someone in authority, and I was heading into some kind of trap. The Experimenter's plan might end before even a month was out. There were no black helicopters circling her house, fortunately.
It was an impressive place, actually – three-car garage, probably four or five bedrooms and at least an acre of land. It had a quaint Tudor-style exterior and the lot was wooded; the closest other house was at least a hundred paces away. From where I stood at the curb, it even looked like it had a basement. I walked up front and center down the driveway, making myself really obvious, then rang the doorbell.
She answered, this time without her big doctor's jacket on. She didn't look as professional as at the hospital – or at least, as professional as when she'd walked in to my room there – but she was easily just as good-looking. The same short-bob brunette hair, sharp nose, and now she had glasses on – a new addition. I guessed she'd been wearing contacts at the hospital.
She had plain navy-blue sweatpants on with no shoes, and a shapeless red sweatshirt that read 'Clemson U' on it. I wondered if she went there. The outfit, oddly, somehow made her look younger... maybe it was the haphazard, thrown-on look without regard for prettying herself up that you would see on some coed cramming for her exams. I myself had on just another pair of khakis and a button-down shirt, a light jacket and walking shoes; another day in Sacramento.
"Ben!" She grabbed me by the arm and roughly yanked me inside. She looked around outside for a few moments before closing the door, like she was going to sell me drugs and the cops might show. She pulled me inside a few paces, then turned around. I never got a good feel in the hospital for how short she was... Bethany was actually quite petite. The sweatshirt was a size or two too large, and only her fingers stuck out of the ends of the sleeves. With the reading glasses on and her hair also a little frizzy, she looked adorable. "Where have you been!"
"I told you. A, uh... boating... trip." I nodded. "I went sailing."
She fumed. "Fine. Be that way. Come here." She dragged me into another room, some kind of office. The house looked even bigger from the inside; it was all very clean and neat, light hardwood floors, an open plan, a mix of pastels and birch that was almost hypnotizing. The office was less distracting, the walls not covered by bookshelves instead being covered by whiteboards.
There was endless script on the whiteboards, almost illegible, mostly shorthand for medical terms I guessed. They made a lot of jokes back in those days about doctors' handwriting, and Bethany certainly fit the stereotype. She turned on her computer and brought up some diagrams of the familiar semi-X pattern that even I recognized as a chromosome.
"This is a control sample I sent to the lab. My own blood, actually. It's basically just normal DNA chromosomes, so you know what they look like." She zoomed out, showing a whole bunch of little X patterns, mostly the same shape. Even back then, kids were shown electron microscope pictures of human DNA in their science textbooks, so they had the general idea of what a chromosome looked like in the old species... assuming they remembered their science classes. Many didn't. Fortunately, I recognized it easily enough.
"Okay." I knew what was coming, but I had to feign surprise. Maybe. It depended on how much she already had figured out... I was on edge.
"This is your DNA as of the time you visited the hospital." She showed me another image, which at first was just a jumble of small lengths of... something, all of which were assembling into a single large circle.
"You sure?" The two images looked nothing alike.
"Ben, something was ripping apart all your DNA! You should be dead! Hell, you should be more than dead, you should be a fucking puddle of inert organic... stuff! This virus – which wasn't built like anything I'd ever looked at – was getting into every cell, shredding your DNA up in record time, and then moving on, somehow without killing the host cell – at least, not immediately. I can't make heads or tails of it. I tried submitting the lab results to the CDC for analysis, but they said it 'isn't a medical problem'. Like that makes any fucking sense! They were just saying they thought it was bullshit!"
I shrugged. "You have to admit they might be closer to the mark than you are. I mean, I'm obviously not dead, sooo..." I gave her a hesitant look.
"This is serious!" She snapped at me and slapped a palm on the desk. I blinked and took a step back. I'd been still kind of caught up in how nice she looked right then, I had forgotten she was in work mode.
"Well, okay, but I'm just saying... clearly, you're missing something here, since I'm alive, and, uhh, not dead. And all."
"I know. I know it doesn't add up." She folded her arms. "But what I have is scary enough. This could be the most dangerous disease ever, Ben. It doesn't focus on specific cell types, and works on white blood cells, which are there to stop this sort of thing. It doesn't seem to have any vectors, but those can appear quickly enough. It's like it's just being thorough and affecting every single cell in the body.
"There's no possible antibody for something like this. It's not even remotely similar to any other virus out there, so there's nowhere for us to even start research on a vaccine. If it picked up even slightly hostile symptoms... millions could die."
I walked up behind her. I'd never been a Don Juan type, and until my encounter with 15226 changed me, I had always been incredibly timid around women. Still, in that moment I somehow felt a little bolder. I walked up behind her as she continued to stare intensely at the still-frame gray picture on the screen, and planted my hands on her shoulders. She looked up at me, and I innocently kept looking at the screen and started to give her a massage.
"What is this?"
