At the end, would you accept your progression from morbidity to mortality? Or would you “rage against the dying of the light”?
My mother suffered from a chronic illness, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, JRA. Macrophage activation syndrome or MAS is a painful and life-threatening side effect of JRA. Microphages, literally, “big eaters”, are white blood cells that consume debris and pathogens in the body. If these microphages rampage out of control, they cannibalize the body. MAS’s effects are rapid and often fatal. The stress of the Great Washout triggered an MAS episode.
My mother was a healer and a researcher and she had lived with JRA for years. She understood the significance of her symptoms. Had she sought medical treatment immediately, she would not have collapsed on the eve of the Recovery. Instead, she stayed focused on discovering how Eva Rozen triggered the Great Washout.
My mother didn’t complain. She merely left this world with one more orphan.
32
CERBERUS (II)
FROM THE MEMORIES
OF DANA ECCO
Years after the Recovery and the humiliation of a lengthy inquest into my parents’ role in the Great Washout, my anger is still fresh.
Dr. Luminaria, the behaviorist who mentored my father, explained to me that the unconscious mind lacks a sense of time. Events that made a mark on me years ago are still current affairs. The mind’s ability to capture sensory input is unimaginable, but it hoards information, doling out memories with a parsimony that would embarrass a miser.
Another agent works with the same automatism as the unconscious mind. My body colludes with my memories and floods me with the chemistry of emotion—cortisol, adrenaline, acetylcholine, catecholamine. I rage, weep, and cower in equal measures, just as Eva Rozen raged for the whole of her unhappy life. My conscious thoughts might dwell on the beautiful or the mundane only to be washed by a bath of neurotransmitters offered by the rage of an eternal fifteen-year-old child who dwells within my unconscious mind. In an instant, I may shiver with fear, quake with rage, or drift into a fugue state—then wonder where I’d gone. The world had its recovery. When will I have mine?
My mother lay dead in her work area. I bent down and kissed her eyelids and cheeks and lips. I picked up her medicine pouch and Eva’s scarab and walked to my mother’s lab. I felt numb, a blessed sensation that would pass all too quickly.
I powered the nanoscope. The device sprayed a phased pattern of X-rays above and below its target. The emissions have a wavelength of just over one-tenth nanometer so it was accurate to the atomic level. The nanoscope analyzes diffraction patterns and produces a detailed image of an object’s surface and electrical composition.
I focused on the scarab. The nanoscope was maddeningly accurate. It was like searching the boardroom conference table with a jeweler’s loupe to find a single grain of salt.
I cursed Eva and her damned scarab, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, but with enough relative space at nanoscale for the contents of an entire library. Where to look? I remembered Eva’s words, “If you want to hide something, put it in plain sight, but make it very, very small” and started with the irregularities in the pin. On the third try, I found her journal. But I faced a bigger challenge. It contained thousands of pages.
I tore myself away from the nanoscope in frustration and helpless rage. How could I find what I needed, what the world so desperately needed, the key for which my parents had given their lives? How would Eva have tagged the information?
I returned to Eva’s workspace, averting my eyes as I passed my mother’s corpse. The doctor and two NMech admins were tending to the body and looked up at me. Judging by their expression, my absence from her corpse was incomprehensible. I continued before they could try to console me.
Eva’s scant possessions were lined up on her desk. An entire lifetime contained in a half-dozen photos, diplomas, and a few pieces of art. I looked again at the photos and artwork. Nothing there. I was running out of time. Where would she have hidden the key I needed?
Then I remembered my last interchange with Eva, when she penned me in an unlocked cage and instructed me to jack nearly a hundred datapillar accounts. One of the accounts bore no name. It had only one item, a strange piece of artwork. At the time, I gave it little heed; events were starting to move too quickly. I had assumed that the unnamed account was hers.
Now the item called out to me. I invoked a heads-up display and looked at the piece contained in that anonymous account. The image was of an antique lithograph, out of place in the ultra-modern sterility of Eva’s world. It portrayed a powerful three-headed dog, eyes bulging, mouths snarling and snapping. One massive paw clutched a human figure. In the lower left corner was a word, all caps: “HELL”, and below that, “Canto 6.” Why would Eva have it? She hated dogs.
I scanned the print with my sleeve and had the office pillar search for the print. In less than a second, I had the answer that had eluded me for hours.
My mother was still lying where she collapsed. Her colleagues stared at me as I passed by, heading back to the nanoscope. I had no time to stop. I’d found the key. The lithograph was by William Blake and it portrayed Cerberus, the guardian beast of the underworld. It fit Eva’s sensibilities perfectly.
Cerberus. That had to be the password. I moved her private journal from her pillar to my sleeve, invoked a display, and skimmed her notes. They were clear, precise, terrifying. The enormity of what she had done made me reel. First, the test cases. A water desalinization plant, disabled. A squad of UN soldiers rendered helpless, overrun. Then kidney dialysis, insulin regulators, terminated for hundreds of thousands, and medication ended for millions by a simple electronic command. What good is a miracle when it is controlled by a madwoman?
Eva’s attack was indeed launched from her home pillar. I ran for the street, ignoring the calls of those attending to my mother’s body. I would grieve later, but now I need to get to Eva’s home as fast as possible. People were dying and I had no time to spare.
I looked across Boylston Street toward Commonwealth Avenue. Four blocks to Eva’s home. An easy jog. But it would be surrounded by emergency workers. I doubled back into my mother’s office and found an NMech military-grade skinsuit with cloaking capabilities. I donned the suit and ran back across Boylston Street and the short distance to Commonwealth Avenue. I turned left and headed west, one long block to Clarendon Street and then a few feet further to Eva Rozen’s home. Six minutes had elapsed.
I was able to avoid police and emergency workers, but not the view of a pyramid of bodies. It was an angry canker on the street. My heart lurched and my gorge rose. I turned away, and scanned the front of the building. There was the fourth-floor window, my father’s passageway to the concrete below and my destination. I slipped in the front door and hurried up the stairs to Eva’s workspace. There was a pillar. I was gambling that it was the one that had launched Great Washout.
I approached it cautiously, scanned with my sleeve and found a data sensor. I triggered a burst from my sleeve, a software cue. The pillar demanded a recognition code. My sleeve emitted a single word, Cerberus. The pillar’s status light turned green. My sleeve pinged.
I was in.
I scanned the programming, afraid that gaining access was the easy part, that Eva’s programming would be incomprehensible. But she was an economical coder, well-organized. She had created an elegant application. It was exactly as Denise Warren had described: there was a sub-routine in the accounts receivable programs that had shut down customer accounts for non-payment. This was an outcome for which Denise had prepared me. I pointed my sleeve at Cerberus and another data burst travelled to Eva’s pillar and deleted the rogue code. Each account’s payment status changed to current. It would take several seconds for all of the accounts to reset, and it would be too late for hundreds of thousands of victims. But millions of others would live.