– That would be my plan.
She takes a glass from me.
– No it wouldn’t. I mean, say it if you need to, but no, that wouldn’t be your plan.
Phil looks up when he hears liquid hitting glass and comes over.
– Yeah, Joe’s plan would be more like to just shoot her.
We both look at him.
He shrugs.
– I’m just saying, but I don’t know anything, so I’m just saying.
He points at the bottle.
– Um?
I drink what’s in my glass, refill it, set the bottle down and find a chair.
– Help yourself, Phil.
I take a sip.
– What we got going on tonight, it won’t happen again.
That worm, I was waxing poetical about, it’s fucking here. Looking at Amanda in her dirty jeans and filthy lab coat as she stares at her monitors, I can just about see it behind her eyes.
Something’s eating her. And I don’t mean Sela.
– I can barely look at you, Joe.
– What’s that mean?
She flicks a couple more slides across her screens.
– I mean, Joe, I mean, come on. We’ve been through so much together. I mean, would I even be here without you. I don’t mean like would I be alive, because, yes, yes, I’d have been dead years ago without you. I mean, would I be here?
Still looking at those screens, she flips a hand, taking in the circumstances.
I empty another finger from my glass. Ha ha.
– Don’t blame me, kid. You got yourself neck deep.
She shakes her head.
– See, and that is why I can barely look at you. Because after all this, you’re still this person I don’t even know. This thing I don’t even know. Gah. I hate it.
I’m watching the screen myself. Those slides. Some I can tell are blood cells. I’ve seen that kind of thing before. White and red. Little blobs and little donuts things. Other stuff she’s looking at, I don’t know. Could be explosions in space, could be sculpture, could be deep-sea spine creatures, could be mold. Could be anything.
But knowing the girl, they’re all viruses. That’s her bag.
Viruses and the Vyrus.
I look into my glass.
– What’s to know.
She giggles.
– Joe.
Giggles some more.
– Oh, Joe.
Gets ahold of herself.
– If you only knew.
I take a drink.
– Har-dee-har-har.
She spins her chair to face me.
– Spying for Predo.
– Yep.
– Again.
– Yep.
– I mean.
– Yep.
She waggles the fingers of her left hand.
– You didn’t have to do that, Joe.
I set my glass down, go for my tobacco.
– What’s that?
She folds her left pinkie, thumb and most of her ring finger into her palm.
– You didn’t have to sit still for Predo doing that to you.
I flip the pouch at Phil, quietly shaking, drinking his booze and staring at Sela.
– Make yourself useful, Phil.
He picks up the pouch and starts to roll one.
I look back at Amanda.
– I’m sorry, you were suggesting what craziness now?
She unfolds her fingers.
– I was suggesting that you went to some odd length to convince Predo you were desperate and would, I mean, you know, do his bidding.
– Lady.
I snap a finger that has a thumb to work with and Phil hands me my smoke.
– You find new ways of being crazy every time I see you.
She turns to her screen.
– Joe Pitt lets himself be captured by Predo. Lets himself be tortured. All so he can convince Predo to send him in here. And make sure I’m OK.
She giggles.
– And I’m not even your type.
I light up.
– Know what’s funniest about how wrong you are?
– Tell me, Joe, I mean, tell me.
I blow smoke.
– It’s that the missing fingers are supposed to make you believe Predo really tried to kill me and I just barely got away.
She tosses some hair.
– Well sure, but I’m talking about subtext.
Phil comes for the bottle and pours himself another.
– You are both, I’m just saying as a casual observer and not like an expert or anything, but you are both in need of some, what I’d call, some serious help.
She flicks to another slide.
– We have some strange history, Joe and me.
The bottle is almost empty. Not that it took very long.
Sela’s breathing has changed, become less peaceful. I’ve wandered around the room and looked at most everything I can, but I still can’t get a look through the half-open door into the living quarters. Phil’s nodding, not quite passed out, but not for lack of trying.
Amanda’s getting weirder as she gets drunker.
And she’s talking. And talking. And talking.
– So for a while I went on this other trip. I mean, OK, the Vyrus, it just won’t make sense. It won’t behave at all virusy. Yes, OK, yes, it lacks the ability to reproduce on its own. Yes it accesses healthy cells so it can get at the machinery it needs to reproduce. But there’s no, like, modus operandi. Like, take a normal virus, it might do all kinds of stuff to get into a cell. It might pretend to be another cell. It might just jump out from behind something and attack a cell. It might, just, you know, like, anything. But like just one thing. OK. And, the Vyrus, it does everything. Watch it long enough, take enough samples from enough infecteds, you’ll see it do everything.
She flicks through a series of slides that look like gunshot wounds, but they aren’t.
– So, OK, so it’s an RNA virus. Start with that. I did. ‘Cause an RNA virus is fast. It creates so many copies of itself so fast, it makes just a ton of mistakes. More mistakes equals more mutation equals greater variance. And blah and blah and blah. Hardier species, we’ve all read Darwin by now and so OK. But so what? Because this thing isn’t mutating over eons or centuries or years or, whatever periods that normal stuff mutates over. I mean, lasting mutations. Not flukes and sports. Not that a virus can really be a sport, but you know, right. So. Radical and lasting mutations that happen like when you turn your back and then turn back.
She looks over at me and bugs her eyes.
– Creeepy.
She looks back at her screens.
– Cool. But creepy. So I start thinking creepy.
More slides.
I drift closer to the door into the living quarters.
Sela snorts, twitches, settles.
Amanda stops on a trio of slides.
– Really, really creepy. Like, don’t laugh, what if, and I hadn’t slept in like six days when I thought this, but what if it’s a space virus?
She taps a key and the slide in the center zooms and it’s just a smear on the screen.
– And I don’t mean like a drifty space virus that hitches a ride on a meteor and crashes into earth and like somehow is adaptable to our environment and stuff. I mean, what if it’s like a targeted virus. I mean, Joe, I mean, germ warfare from outer space, I mean.
She taps that same key and the smear becomes a blur.
– Not against us. That’s stupid. I mean, I hate calling it this but my dad never gave it a name and just whatever, but look at the zombie bacteria. There’s all this, like, snobbery in the Vampyre community about this stuff. You all act like, oh, Zombie scum created by a bacteria must be eliminated while we higher forms created by a virus must live on. But, ha ha, bacteria are so much more advanced than viruses that it isn’t even funny. I mean, bacteria are alive. Viruses don’t even have a nucleus. But still, the Vyrus and the zombie thing, they have these weird similarities. Like, one thing the Vyrus does is it sometimes mimics bacteria. To get close to other bacteria. And infect them. It burns out like that, but it happens when you put them together. Which is weird. So imagine this scenario where you have, and I already said don’t laugh, you have these aliens at war. And this war it’s on like, a massive scale. Galactic in scope. Which means, ipsy-facty, that it’s slooow. ’Cause of E=MC2, yeah? OK. So what if a big part of this war is about territory. And so they, here, see, they infect whole worlds. They, this is wild, they design bio-agents for prospective territories, places they may want to colonize in like millions of years, and they shoot these weapons at the worlds and they infect certain species and their enemies do the same thing and the idea is that the infected species will fight it out and the one that wins is programmed by the infection, I mean, just in the way it has to exist, what it eats and just the basics, what it does to live will help to make the world more hospitable for the aliens in millions of years if they ever come.