Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

“Careful,” he said, releasing Sav. He stepped back. “The footing is treacherous.”

The weight of the gun seemed to drag Sav’s arm down. Its snout pointed at the ground.

“What are you planning to do with that?” Josua asked.

“I…I was waiting for the Facilitator.”

Josua chuckled. “It wouldn’t matter, you know. I’d have continued the revivals myself. You’d end up having to shoot both of us. Maybe Liis too. And where’d that leave you?”

Sliding his index finger onto the trigger, Sav let it rest there lightly. “If that’s what I have to do,” he said. And for the first time he knew with certainty he’d do it. “I won’t let you or Hebuiza infect anyone else.”

“There won’t be any more resurrections. No more experiments.” Josua sounded almost wistful.

“I don’t believe you.”

“And I don’t care whether you do or not.” Josua inclined his head to stare at the heavens.

“Stop this bullshit!” Levelling the gun, Sav aimed it at Josua’s temple.

Josua merely glanced at the gun and continued scanning the sky. “Things have changed.”

“If you have something to say, say it!”

Josua lowered his head and locked gazes with Sav. “Hebuiza’s isolated the plague’s vectors. He’s developed a test to detect carriers. So there’s no need for further experiments.”

Sav’s let his arm down. “He’s found out how the plague’s transmitted? Then we should be able to decide if it’s safe to stay. Shouldn’t we?”

Josua’s lips turned up in a rictus grin. “Oh, it’s safe alright,” he said. “As safe as anywhere else.”

“I…I don’t understand.”

“Today Hebuiza retested all the samples he took from us earlier.” In the dark, Josua’s eyes seemed to glow with an eerie radiance. “We’re all carrying the plague.”

Sav’s heart froze in his chest; he felt dizzy, as if the world was shifting beneath him. “We’ve caught it?”

“We had it before we were born.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you remember what the Director here said, about the spread of the plague? That it was highly contagious? And that the disease also broke out simultaneously across Bh’Haret and on the orbitals? Impossible, from an epidemiological perspective. Infectious diseases don’t spread that way. We dismissed her report, attributed it to the panic and hysteria that followed the onset of the disease.” Josua paused, his breath unfurling before him in a tangle of complex knots. “Yet that’s exactly what we observed in our own samples. Bacteria in isolated cultures spontaneously turned into viral factories within minutes of one another. After we’d seen this same pattern repeat many times in different samples, we realised that the only way this could happen was if a large percentage of the population already carried the disease-in a dormant stage.”

Despite the chill in the air, Sav felt drops of perspiration run along his temple, curve behind the line of his jaw.

“Hebuiza calls it a Trojan. A latent infection. He believes it began spreading through the population fifty one years before we left. In mutated versions of common bacteria that inhabit the skin and upper respiratory tract. The sort that we don’t even pay attention to because they’re universal and innocuous. And the sort that are readily passed back and forth among people. Simply by breathing. Or through touch. Five decades gave the bacteria plenty of time to move from one host to the next, displacing its harmless predecessors. Until the whole population had been infected and reinfected countless times.”

“Then…then why aren’t we dead yet?”

“We weren’t meant to be.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The bacteria was designed to express itself after a particular time period has passed.”

“Designed? You mean it wasn’t natural?”

“We drew blood samples from several of the longer term interees. The mutated bacteria appears abruptly in the population fifty years ago. Before that there’s no trace of it. Nothing. No possible progenitors. The odds of a mutation like that occurring spontaneously, in different bacteria, are astronomical. ‘A vanishing probability,’ is what Hebuiza said. Which means that it’s almost certain it was engineered and introduced deliberately.” He smiled bitterly. “A kind of deleterious gene therapy.”

“I still don’t understand why we haven’t gotten sick….”

“Ah, that’s the best part!” Josua smiled and shook his head, as if he was admiring the cleverness of the plague. “The bacteria was engineered to replicate at a precise rate. Most do so at a pretty steady rate to begin with, so fine tuning and synchronizing the clock genes wouldn’t have been difficult. Each time a bacterium replicated it dropped a single link in its DNA strand. Like a timer running down. When the last link in the chain fell away, the DNA started producing some interesting new proteins, causing the bacteria to mutate into a bacteriophage, a highly infectious and extremely toxic viral factory.”

Incredulous, Sav stared at Josua. If what he was saying was true, the disease was inside him right now, a molecular time bomb ticking down.

“That’s why it didn’t spread as a normal disease would. Because everyone on Bh’Haret had been infected already, most, like you and me, before they’d even been born. But the bacteria was always ticking down, everyone carrying an identical tiny clock, losing that next link each time it reproduced…until it mutated the final time.”

“How long?” Sav’s voice shook. “How long do we have?”

“The timer ran out just after we left Bh’Haret, thirty years ago. If we’d never gone into cryosuspension, then we’d have manifested symptoms just like everyone else, half a year after the Ea departed. Our longhaul only delayed the inevitable….” Josua pulled his hands out of his pockets and rubbed them together. “We have half a year less the time we’ve been out of stasis since our return. Which leaves us a little over a hundred days.” He raised his hands to his mouth and blew on them.

“What about antibiotics?” Sav said, fighting to calm himself, to keep the panic from his voice. “To kill the bacteria? If we can detect it, can’t we kill it off?”

“If we had the time, expertise and equipment, we might have had a chance. But Hebuiza says it’s too complex a problem. The modified bacteria were designed to be persistent in their expression, and resistant to antibiotics. Some localize in the brain and nervous system, making treatment virtually impossible. An agent strong enough to kill them off would almost certainly kill us too.”

“What about the crew of The Viracosa? They went into suspension five years before us, so they should have another five years left. If we return to the cells while they work on a cure….”

“Liis boarded The Viracosa two days ago. We only discovered the vector this morning.” Josua laughed mirthlessly. “We were worried about her catching something from them. But now she’s exposed them to our version of the bacteria. And they’ve passed theirs to her. Both have their own internal timers. Unfortunately, the one that expires sooner is the only one that counts. Which means their life expectancy is now identical to ours.”

“Then other ships-”

“Other than The Viracosa, we could only confirm one other ship scheduled to return. The Strange Matter departed after our mission, and only days before the first cases of the disease were reported. So its crew was likely stricken after they were revived at their destination. Chances are they never began the return leg of the journey. Or if they did, they will have gone back into stasis suffering from the early stages of the disease.”

A hundred days. Sav couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea.

Josua’s continued to speak about the plague; clouds of breath unrolled before him, were snatched away by the wind. But Sav was only half listening.

“…incubation period of three to five days…uncertainty about insect and anthropod vectors….”

A hundred days. Isolated words and phrases caught at Sav’s attention, then slipped away.

“….multiple causation…re-engineered protease inhibitors…could only be Nexus.”

Sav looked up. “Nexus? You think it was Nexus?” Sav felt a sudden surge of anger, although he wasn’t quite sure who he was angry at. “In all probability we created it. Then we turned it on ourselves.”

“No,” Josua said. “Hebuiza assured me it was too technically advanced to have been engineered on Bh’Haret. Inconceivable, in fact, given the level of bio-technology at the time it was introduced into the population.” Josua had a fervent expression on his face. It wasn’t the look of defeat. But one of determination. To Josua, Sav realized, this discovery had been a victory. A vindication of his own paranoid theories about Nexus. “It’s the way they view things, Sav-in decades and centuries. Plant a little time bomb on a world that’s dragging its heels on joining the Ascension Program. If eventually they submit, then disarm the trojan with a counter before anyone is the wiser. Otherwise, let it run its course and a troublesome civilization meets a tragic end. Naturally, Nexus would deny involvement. Like you, they’d suggest a biological weapon slipped out of our own labs. Or that maybe it was an unlikely, but natural, pathogen. And no one could prove any different. But all the other non-affiliates would see Nexus’ hand in this thing and would view it as a warning: join the Ascension program or the same thing might happen to you.”

A dull ringing had begun in Sav’s ears; he felt disoriented. Beneath him, he felt the cold of the lifeless concrete penetrate the soles of his boots, had a sudden vision of himself standing there, on the tip of a dead, empty world.

A hundred days.

The number tumbled through his mind. He imagined the bacteria coating his skin, nestled in his throat and esophogous, undergoing division, reproducing over and over in an inescapable cycle. A clock winding down. Before, when he hadn’t been certain who to blame for the plague, he’d anticipated his death as if it were a kind of penance, his punishment for having disavowed his world. But now Josua was telling him it had been Nexus.

Sav hefted the gun, turned it in his hand like he was examining it. “Then there’s nothing left for us to do.” He raised the gun to his head. “Except die.”

“No, Sav!” Josua moved towards him; Sav cocked the trigger and Josua froze.

But Sav knew right away he didn’t have the courage to pull the trigger. He’d never had the courage to do anything so definitive. In anger, he flung the weapon outward as hard as he could, nearly jerking his arm out of its socket. The gun arced slowly in the night, plummeting into the bushes below and clattering away.

For a time the two men stood in silence, regarding one another. Then Josua spoke. “It’s not hopeless,” he said softly.

Sav’s heart seemed to stop. “But you said-”

“We’ll force Nexus to give us the cure.”

For an instant Sav had allowed himself a faint sliver of hope; but that collapsed with Josua’s improbable notion. How could they force Nexus to do anything? Light years away in distance, millennia more advanced in technology. The idea wasn’t just absurdit was insane. Sav’s surprise twisted into disgust. He shoved past Josua.

“Wait, Sav….”

Sav ignored him. What more could there be to say?

Josua was yelling something about Hebuiza, but Sav had stopped listening. He trotted away from the facility along a small footpath and stumbled under the canopy of the nearest trees, thin branches clawing at his face, his feet sliding on the thin layer of snow. He stumbled again, lost his balance, and barked his shin against the edge of a rock. But he felt it only in an abstract way. Then the ground fell away in front of him and he plunged down an incline, into a darkness as complete and irrevocable as his future.

Day 80

From where he