Day 123 - Babel - Chapter 19 (2608 words)

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BABEL

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 19

Nicholas Bianni was a virologist, technically he still was one if he thought about it, but that was something he was not keen on doing that much off. He lived alone in a place where he would not run into anyone else, hopefully ever again. He was avoiding people, Babel or the Immune Few he drew no distinction because he was was avoiding them all.

He had found a lodge of some kind not long after the initial outbreak of the Babel, when it was thought to be just a flu and he had gone there knowing what would be happening next. He took food, supplies and survival gear and then just disappeared into the woods, avoiding everyone from then onwards. He had a radio, though when the language centre phase of the disease kicked in the signals started dropping off the airwaves one after the other. He was immune, that was something he knew from the very start, before the distinction became noticeable or pronounced, Nick had the one thing that virtually no one else had, the knowledge of what it was.

He had a cure, an antibody that protected people against the Babel in the stage one phase but it was useless on the stage two, once you had stage one it was too late and too bad. He had been working on the inoculation when the stage one hit the world, by the time he understood that it was his Antigenic Shift experiments that had somehow escaped the lab, it was too late, too bad.

There was no cute name for it like “Babel” which he had heard on the radio broadcasts a few times before they stopped altogether, it was a code named experiment not designed for release or market anywhere. To Dr Bianni it was ASHA combination 3F and it was one in a long line of experiments he was working on as a eighty/twenty project for the Biotech firm where he was employed. Eighty percent of the time he was working on the synthesis of viral proteins and then cataloguing the morphology, transmission and infection rates in sample cells that his various lab assistants grew, cultured and disposed of on a daily basis.

Now he had no exposure at all to any kind of science, viruses and proteins were things in his past and he wanted to stay away from the world as a whole. There had been planes and the occasional helicopter up this way in the days before the Babel descended in stage two, now this place was silent and the air was forever still like the world was empty apart from him. He missed other souls on occasion, he still wanted companionship and sex like a normal person would, though he understood that he could never have it again. The way the world would have gone in stage two would have been critical and maybe even an extinction level event. That was the sobering thought, the one that kept him away from everyone on the planet, in limbo or in hell it didn't matter which he thought it was.

There was excitement at the monthly WIP meeting where he shared the initial results of the ASHA 3F experiments and he was granted licence to progress to live tissue trials with birds and a series of variations on the H5N1 virus family. The work was something he did one day a week and he had not even started clinical trials on the birds when the ASHA 3F manifested itself in the world wide population in stage one. He knew that it would go on to affect the speech area of the brain, the language centre that controlled the functions that translated patterns vocally and visually into a language, that was the point. He had been working on creating an antigenic shift between a strain of influenza and a little known virus that caused inflammation in the area of the brain that controlled language. He had known what ASHA 3F would do in vague terms, and his reporting chain had an idea about the potential for it but it had not progressed beyond the paper he had written talking the main points, without the map for the change, in his WIP to the management team.

The lodge in the middle of nowhere was spacious, which added to his sense of solitude and confinement event though he was free to leave and there was plenty of space around him, he just could not conceive of ever going back to pick of the expected corpse of humanity. He had plenty of time to ensure that the home he had taken and remade for himself was safe from predators and natural events like forest fires. He had created a ring of fire-breaks around the building itself which sat in a gully, away from winds that could carry sparks or ash in a big fire. The breaks were only thirty to fifty feet wide in places and he spent every day creating them, chopping down trees in concentric but irregular rings around the centre where the house was. The wood he took from the trees and processed into planks or firewood for building or burning off in the winter. It was the most rustic and unscientific life he could think of, a penance in physical labour, splinters and blisters. \

They had chosen birds but had not progressed to the actual trials with what they had so far. The Avian Flu was virulent enough as a host and the unnamed encephalitis causing strain that he had synthesised was the secondary mutation that was being altered to link with the H5N1 component. Together they would form a weapon that could potentially silence your enemies. That was the plan all along, they made no effort to hide that idea in the meetings. They were a Biotech company that provided vaccines and medicines alongside research and development for all kinds of commercial partnerships. ASHA 3F was never built outside the lab, never infected outside of a Petri dish and it's only exposure to humans was a proof of concept study that generated some funding for a eighty/twenty project for the author, Dr Nicholas Bianni.

He deserved to be alone, it was hard and there was no end or relief to his self imposed exile every in sight, he would die here alone and no one would ever know what he did. Of course he knew that it would be impossible to even explain it to the 99.9% of people that were now Babel infected. There had been the initial reports that the effective rate of this disease they were naming Babel, while they still could, was that high. He felt no pride at all that he had proved to be more effective than the random mutation of nature, than any synthesis produced so far including the basic genetics of life creation. He was in the 0.1% range because he was inoculated against the first phase, he had taken the precaution in the early days when he was handling the H5N1 variations, he had a enzyme which he knew would block the binding of the virus in the infection stage, and the treatment was a daily dose of this enzyme during the exposure phase, but useless afterwards.

The ASHA 3F was designed to burn out, it was a humane chemical weapon, or it would have been if it had made it all the way to final product stage. That was why it was on his conscience and on his eighty/twenty list, it was a non-lethal chemical weapon that would essentially put a stop to combat operations when deployed. The proposal was simple, drop an airborne variant of the flu into the required area, allow the flu to take effect and then within a set period of time the language centres of brain would be struck with an encephalitic infection, one that would halt all communications in the enemy. Start with a cough and within say a week your enemy would not be able to communicate until the virus ran it's course. That was the plan, inoculate your troops with the enzyme for battlefield operations and then bomb the disease into the population and then the war would be over with nary a shot fired.

The supplies he had stocked up on would last for decades, he had been planning to flee before the first symptoms of phase two ever hit, though he did not have an exact idea of when that would be. In the samples it had been extrapolated to months and he would have a much better idea if they had proceeded to the bird subjects and seen it in action. His daily routine was now a matter of life and hard work to get through every day. The physical labour portion of his day was the morning where he would clear trees and make in roads through the woods, preserving as much as he could but making breaks, clearings and avoiding wildlife where possible. He had encountered a bear or two in his time in the woods, he was in proximity to the Yosemite National Park, or the area that they had named that in the days before the Babel. He was not sure if he was in the old boundary of the park here or not. Then he would come back to the house and make lunch, prepare his dinner and then write in the afternoon. At first it was notes on his work, then it became a rambling apology and finally an observation on life alone. After the evening meal he would drink, not a lot but enough to make the evening dip into a softer and mellower tone. His hangovers were mild and he worked through them the next morning with his axe and saw, the extra burden a punishment on top of the one he lived every day already.

His manager was very excited about the development of the ASHA 3 range and kept a close eye on it whenever Nick reported results, but he saw potential and not the full notes. No one but Nick knew how to produce the ASHA 3F variant and he kept it that way until the ASHA 3F turned up in his inbox one day. The flu pandemic, that which became the stage one of Babel when it became clear later of the link, was being isolated and studied by a raft of people in the worldwide spread of this highly contagious but largely non fatal flu pandemic. The make up that they had discovered had been mapped, up and sent for peer review and input in a drive to find out what they could about this new but apparently harmless disease. He got an email in his inbox titled “Have you seen this man?” it was a light hearted introduction to the plea for assistance in the search for viral make up and antigen discovery process. Because it was a non fatal disease there was not a large fund for the research, but the transmission and infection rates were startling and sexy for that very reason, so it was a good hobby project that looked for volunteers who wanted to be in on one of the less urgent but more interesting cases they had seen. Nick opened the email, scanned through the premise and the pleas, looking at the data and the findings so far.

Then he saw ASHA 3F staring at him from his computer screen and it stopped him cold, the blood rushing from his body and pooling what felt like somewhere below his physical body. He double checked the email, called a colleague in and checked her email to see if she got the same map of the virus that he did. It was identical and it was ASHA 3F.

There had been two forest fires in the time that he had been in the woods and in both cases the breaks saved his life, and he lives of hundreds of animals who fled backwards through the rings to shelter in the copses of trees and bush that existed in the miles around his rural prison home. He stayed indoors for days as the animal population for some distance lived in his backyard essentially, but it was less like a zoo and more like the set of a nature documentary crossed with a gladiatorial combat arena. When the danger had passed he took an air-horn and a gun and cleared most of the wildlife away that stayed around, returning the area to a semblance of normalcy until the second fire came along. The second one was much smaller and died a lot faster, the original burn area created a new growth patch the size of a small forest and this slowed the inferno considerably.

He had reported the ASHA 3F to his boss who thought he was joking at first, but then when they went over the results they knew what they were looking at and sat in silence for the rest of the day. They reported up the chain but at some point the plug was pulled and only a dozen people knew that the flu virus was in fact a designed antigenic shift project from there company. Everyone who was in the know, with one exception, had two things in common. They knew what was coming and they all had caught stage one already. They were still holding meetings when Nick took his research notes off the server, destroying samples, back up notes and all possible references to the project he could find. They called security and had him restrained and sent him home too cool off while they thought about what to do next. After that DR Bianni had no idea what happened as he cleared out his bank accounts, bought a truck and started loading up on supplies for survival. He knew what was coming and he knew that it would not affect him, but that only one in a thousand people would soon be unaffected from the stage two wave, which would be fast and brutal.

Taking away the power to communicate was a powerful tool in an arsenal for any military that controlled it, and used surgically it would save more lives than a war could ever hope to do. The idea that unfettered access to the general population was possible should have been more than enough for everyone to be as careful and sparing as they could with it's use. They all understood that the chaos and frustration that would come from being unable to speak? That would be cataclysmic and could spell the end of the human race. It would be an ugly and violent end to society, of that he had zero doubt, it cold also be the end of the human race.

When they started calling it the Babel on the radio, in the days before all media ceased to exist, it was the best analogy that Nick could imagine. God had imposed the curse on the residents of Babylon, building the tower that was an affront to God, and then made every single person speak a different language, and then instantly they all broke apart and could not work, speak, interact or exist in the same space. It was a moral tale of not reaching beyond your boundaries, respecting them and realising how tenuous humans are on a scale of man to God. Dr Bianni had none of this in mind when he bound his viruses together.

He wanted ASHA 3F to save lives, not be the last voice they heard.