Prologue
“Life, then death. That has always been the natural order. But what if that could be changed? What if we could utilize the process of death to create more life? Death, then life. That is what we are building here.”
–Dr Ava Sherman. Manchester, New Hampshire. 11 Years Before.
* * *
Just a little scratch. It was just a little scratch.
Private Jack Wilkinson stumbled through the brush as distant alarms faded. Another few miles through the forest, and he’d be in the clear.
God damn though, how he had never had a headache half as severe. Every step felt like a hammer to his ears. Every heartbeat sent another throb to his scalp. The sun might as well have been shooting needles straight into his eyes. It was too fucking bright.
Had he been this tired when he’d woken up, or his legs this tense? It had been a long night, and he’d spent most of it in the bottle. Figures that he would have a day like this after a night like that.
Keep your mask on, they’d told him. Yeah, well, he’d kept the damn mask on. The whole hazmat getup too. From the full-visor, air-supplied respirator that always smelled like ass, to the steel-toed boots and attached shanks that made his feet numb after a couple minutes of use, to the hefty SCBA that had to be strapped to his back, to the plastic fabric that draped over the whole mess, and chafed against his skin like an expired condom. Jack had worn all the right gear, and done everything by the book. It wasn’t on him that things went south the moment they got down there. What else could he have done when management hadn’t told them shit?
Jack checked his arm again. A thin, red line ran an inch down his arm where he’d been grabbed. Just a scratch, and not much else. It had barely even broken the skin. And yet, Dr Sherman’s words played over and over in his mind. Any contact had to be reported.
Could he have gotten the same thing as those people downstairs?
Jack shook his head. Stress was getting to him. He’d just been through the ringer today, and would no doubt be feeling the weight of Aeon’s legal team down his throat the moment they figured out he’d made a run for it. That was fine. He could worry about lawsuits and NDAs and all that other bullshit coming his way afterwards, so long as he got out now.
And so Jack kept moving. One step at a time, one foot in front of the other, his sole companion the terror that had brought him here.
* * *
Was this what Ava had wanted?
Ever since that first moment where humans had developed enough cognizance to identify their own mortality, they had done everything in their power to stave off death. Society had been developed in order to maximize the odds through safety of numbers. Structures had been raised that were capable of surpassing natural disasters. The advent of medicine was utilized to repair damage that the body sustained. Under a more pronounced lens, one might argue that humanity had always premised its existence against the inevitability of death. It was an endless battle waged by just about every member of the species, each successive iteration better equipped than the last.
Their struggles had borne success as well. The groundwork had been led by generations of her scientific predecessors, and victory had finally been achieved. With this latest breakthrough, death had been irrefutably defeated.
And yet, Dr Ava Sherman could not help but wonder. Was this what she had wanted?
She stared into the eyes of her patient. They were white, empty, and without purpose, just like every other successful subject in the HBRS trials. His animation had been restored, but it lacked the context of a healthy-minded adult, as if the patient’s very soul had been sucked out, leaving only a gaping, hollow husk. A vegetable that could still move.
One of her attendees leaned in. “Private Turner, can you understand us?”
The patient thrashed against his restraints. Her attendee withdrew a step, his head bobbing about from within the hazmat suit that Ava had made them all wear. This was not the first time they had witnessed such aggression from inside the walls of Aeon Dynamic’s Manchester facility, but this was perhaps the only time it had ever been observed outside their control.
Ava studied her environment anew. The temporary hospice room on the second floor of R&D was far from ideal, even with the plastic dividers that had been affixed to the windows, and armed security patrolling the corridors outside, but it was all they had to work with after the breach had first been reported. Until she knew exactly what had happened in the sub-basement lab, she could not risk letting anything get off site. Too much was at stake.
“Billy Turner,” her attendee said again, “please respond.”
“It’s no use,” Ava explained, her eyes fixed on the medical equipment behind. “He’s already gone.”
Her attendee noticed the same anomaly with a gasp. Even though their patient still flailed about like a rabid dog, the heart monitor showed nothing but a dead, flat line.
* * *
Jack pushed a branch out of the way, and nearly fell flat the moment the weight shifted. This forest was too dense.
“Fucking hell!” he cursed, his lungs heavy. He hadn’t felt this weak for ages. Maybe since basic.
Again he looked into the New Hampshire sky, and again he swore he could feel the literal weight of the sun pressing against his face. The roof of his mouth could have been filled with cotton, yet his hair was drenched in sweat. Hot and cold reversed, light more painful than dark. His scalp was rebelling against his brain, and all his other senses were taking part. What the hell was happening to him?
The scratch had gone inflamed too. What had started as a normal scarlet line had blackened with all the grime, and it almost looked like some of the nearby veins were darkening too.
Jack paused, the images of what he’d seen downstairs still trapped in his mind. That blankness in their eyes… The noise they’d made when they attacked… If anything like that ever happened to him…
Jack blinked through the growing headache. There was still a chance to get out of this. If he made a B-line away from Aeon’s base, he could work his way to safety before they found him. His only hope was to go straight for the re… Res… R–?
Wait. What’s that word? Recipe? Restoration? Receiver? The one with water. He had to have driven by that place a thousand times before. Him and Willy. That was wrong. Him and Billy. They’d gone by that water place a bunch. They’d driven by it on the way to work. Why couldn’t he remember the fucking word!?
Reservoir. That’s it. He needed to get to the reservoir. It’d be safe there.
Jack let out a deep breath to clear his mind. No more time to think. Whatever was happening to his head could wait. He had to keep moving. Keep breathing. Had to get to the reservoir now. Consequences later.
* * *
It had been a massacre.
Ava studied the scene from behind her polyethylene suit, her breath struggling to stay even as it recycled back into the respirator strapped to her face.
Her colleagues laid scattered about the main hall where they had been left, their bodies perforated with bullets. Blood was still leaking out before congealing into a solid mass in the center of the pile where they had fallen. Other staff kept a healthy distance as they snapped photographs and collected samples.
It was the eyes that drew Ava’s attention most. Pupils whitened until they were blank slates. Neither angry nor malicious, but empty and lifeless. Just like the affected soldier upstairs.
Ava gulped without intent. These were her people. Her fellow scientists. Men and women of intellect, and wealth, and prestige. All reduced to this.
This type of breach should not have been possible. They had conducted the bulk of the HBRS trials in their sub-basement laboratory. The entire unit was self-contained, with its own air filtration network, showers for decontamination, biometric locks on the doors, and insulation in the walls to prevent the outflow of unwanted electronic signals. The Department of Defense had insisted on the extra security, and Aeon Dynamic had no choice but to yield to the whims of their top investor. How many hours of Ava’s own life had she spent locked in this prison over a false alarm?
Her sight fell to Aeon Dynamic’s insignia sitting proudly above. It was no more than the letters ‘AD’ in a custom, modernized font, along with an arrow cutting through the center of the A, pointing right. Marketing had been responsible for that decision. Aeon Dynamic was a forward-thinking company. Customers were supposed to infer that mindset whenever they saw the logo.
Ava started to consider this design more philosophically, however. “Aeon” was a derivation of the word “life”, and being “dynamic” meant that it was in constant flux. Though the implication was that life could be progressed forward through the power of this company, change was capable of expanding in any direction. Forward, backward, or even laterally.
It was that last point that felt the most salient. As Ava stared at the infected corpses of her colleagues, she wondered which way that life had been altered here. Had her research brought it forward as she had dreamed, or had she merely pushed “life” into its own unique state?
General Tyson drew close, his own meaty frame bulging against the hazmat suit. “Any idea how this happened yet?”
Ava sighed. “We’re still collecting data.”
“You think it might be sabotage?”
“That is irrelevant at this point. The priority is to mitigate exposure.” She glanced his way. “Has anyone else on the security team showed symptoms?”
He shook his head. “No. As far as we can tell, Private Turner was the only one who got exposed.”
“I was informed that he was attacked after pulling someone off of Private Wilkinson.”
He paused. “Wilkinson’s still missing.”
The blood froze in her veins. “You have to find him, Jon.”
“My people are working double time to track him down, but he slipped into the woods after breaking quarantine. It’d be faster if we used dogs.”
“No dogs. We can’t risk cross-exposure until we understand how communicability occurred. Your men are on their own until we have him in custody, and they’ll all need Level 3 suits or higher. Nothing less.”
Tyson gulped. “It really that bad?”
“Let me make one thing clear. If we don’t find him, facing some Senate oversight committee will be the least of our worries.” Ava studied the corpses of her dead colleagues. “We need to control this now, or what happened here will happen everywhere.”
* * *
Couldn’t think. Couldn’t remember.
His mind… Kept coming in and out. Jack tried to focus, and focus real hard at that, but he’d only make it a few moments before his head would drift into something else, and then he’d forget whatever it was that he’d just been thinking about. Plans, thoughts, memories. All so confusing right now.
Jack couldn’t remember what his mother looked like. How could he not remember her? They’d been living together for eighteen years in their trailer in Tennessee… Or had that been North Carolina? He shouldn’t have been forgetting something like that. It wasn’t normal to forget something like that. He should have known what his ex-fiancé looked like. That was right. They’d spent seven months together in her parents’ home in Milwaukee. Or was that with his mother? His mother’s house in Milwaukee. It was somewhere, that was for sure.
Every second. Every moment. Another battle on its own. Why was it all getting so goddamned jumbled?
Was this what it was like for them? Thinking. Fighting. Losing? Did all those science folks slowly forget themselves, little by little, their minds emptying from the inside-out?
Maybe this was dying. If the soul left the body when it passed, then maybe his soul was just draining out, drop by drop. That would be okay if there was a heaven. He didn’t need his body in heaven. He’d be whole again once there.
But maybe there was no heaven. Maybe this was it, and each memory he forgot was another lost forever. Gone. Poof. Drifted back into the ether where it had started. That would be bad.
What was the sum of a man’s soul, but all that he had collected within his mind? His dreams and nightmares, his fears and hopes, the memories of all he’d hated and loved. What would life become with those taken away? Would he still be a man, or just an empty husk? Dead. Hollow. A body without a soul.
He couldn’t let that happen. He couldn’t go hollow like the science folks back there. He had to keep moving. It wouldn’t be far now. Safety was close. Had to get to the reservoir. There was hope there. A chance to survive.
But still, he had one question left… Why couldn’t he remember his name?
* * *
Ava remembered the moment that had first driven her down this path. It had been in the ICU with her parents, all those decades ago. No one had known at the time that the source of their illness was a ruptured boiler that had saturated their home with carbon monoxide, so the doctors were just as powerless as her against the force that had slowly leeched the life from them. An invisible, unstoppable enemy that had claimed the only family she had ever known.
Ava had made a promise to herself back then. She knew that she would accomplish an insurmountable goal. Death itself would be defeated by her hands. No matter the odds. No matter the struggle. She would become the person to accomplish that feat.
Her life had been built around this dream. From the Pre-Medical and Chemistry double majors she had taken in undergraduate studies, to the ever more demanding Biophysics Masters and MD after her post-graduate residency, to the eventual PhD she had acquired, to her recruitment into Aeon Dynamic. It had all been building to here and now.
So why must the prize have been tainted?
The helicopter sliced through the air, with Tyson by her side.
“We’ve blocked the main road into Manchester,” Tyson explained, “and I’ve got a cordon established on the outskirts of the city. A second team is getting prepped to secure the reservoir due south of here, but it will take some time before they’re out. Currently, we’re prioritizing the main routes of traffic since that’s where we believe he’s heading.”
“Good,” Ava said, her voice hoarse against the whir of the helicopter. “We’ll want to make sure that the forest is evacuated if we plan to sterilize it properly.”
“I’ve been in talks with the Pentagon to get napalm at the quantities you’re demanding, but don’t you think this is a little excessive?”
“HBRS pseudo-cells should degrade almost instantaneously outside the human body, but we still don’t know how the initial team was exposed.”
He sighed. “No way we’ll be keeping this under wraps.”
Ava nodded. “Yes, this will lead to a media firestorm that will destroy most of our benefactors, and I suspect that you and I will end up in jail before this is over. But the alternative is worse. It has been less than six hours since the breach was first reported, and we’ve had multiple generations of transmission. At the rate to which HBRS is proliferating in infected subjects, a majority of people in a city the size of Manchester would be infected in days if it is not properly contained.”
“And they wouldn’t be alone,” Tyson deduced.
No, they would not, Ava considered, her thumb on the report from today’s trial run. “HBRS-15.21,” it said. A rather mundane title for what had taken over a decade of research to achieve. It was her magnum opus, the utmost pinnacle of biophysical developments.
And yet, it still was not enough, for HBRS-15.21, like any of its predecessors, could never quite capture the fragility of the human mind. That power was beyond her grasp, and so long as such an ethereal essence could not be preserved past death, the entire process was a waste. Humanity would not have truly escaped its prison. They would have merely swapped one warden with another.
As Ava stared out the helicopter window and into the city, she knew the truth.
This phenomenon could not be allowed to roam free.
* * *
Free. Free. Free.
That’s what he was. Free. Had gotten out. Now they couldn’t catch him. Had to keep moving. Keep from getting caught.
Trees thinning. Water close. Get to water. Water was free.
Almost all gone now. The thoughts. The memories. They were his once. But not now. Getting sick. Going hollow. Couldn’t let that happen. Had to keep moving.
Body dying too. Blood coming out. Nose. Mouth. Hands covered. Skin whiter than normal. Getting whiter. Everywhere in pain. Not much time left.
Then there were noises. Voices. Chopper above. Getting close. Couldn’t stop. Move faster away. Had to save self.
He could see it. The reservoir. Only hope. Used to feed city. People there. Just had to walk closer. Move to it. Nothing else mattered. Get to reservoir and save self. Couldn’t die. Couldn’t let mind go hollow. Couldn’t end like this.
He slipped. Legs not working… Body tumbling… Into reservoir. So cold. Everything dark. Mind almost gone… No more control. No way to move. Only death now…
This wasn’t fair. It wasn’t his fault… It was just… It was just…
Just… A… Scratch…?
