“It was my line of work. I studied it intensely as a near-perfect example of an incredibly contagious disease that spread like wildfire, and killed faster than just about anything else ever seen. To put it into perspective, it killed four times more people than the Black Death in the Middle Ages. It’s one of the true nightmare diseases nature has visited on the planet. It infected nearly forty percent of the world population, and caused the body’s immune system to turn against itself. Victims literally drowned in their own lung fluid while their skin turned blue from lack of oxygen. One of the reasons it was so deadly was because those with stronger immune systems had a more powerful response, which translated into it being more severe in the young and healthy. It’s incredibly virulent, and a relatively simple protein chain. The full RNA was sequenced in 2005, and I spent considerable effort analyzing it in my spare time. Which believe it or not, I have an abundance of, even with my busy social schedule here.”
“And this… is a weaponized form of H1N1?”
“I would say it’s definitely lab-created, but I can’t tell what the modifications are. The letter string is a description, so I could figure it out in broad strokes given enough time, but the real question would require computing time and a controlled population study.”
“The real question?”
“How much more lethal is it, and how much more contagious, than the original eight-gene virus. Whenever you modify something like this, it would be to increase one, or both. But… this is insanity. It could wipe out huge population centers in a matter of days or weeks. I mean, huge, as in a percentage of the total global population. Nobody would want to release this, much less develop it…”
“Unless…” Jeffrey blurted, unable to help himself.
“Unless there was already a vaccine developed that was a hundred percent effective, that could be manufactured in sufficient quantities and rapidly enough to inoculate those you wanted to save from it.”
“Wait. Then this could be used for a crude population control?”
“I can’t see any other reason to use it. It’s akin to releasing the devil onto the planet. If it’s been modified substantially enough, it could kill ten, twenty, thirty or more percent of the human race in short order…” Schmidt stopped, a thought obviously occurring to him. “It is madness, but it could make sense to those who released HIV. The big problem there might have been that ultimately, HIV doesn’t kill fast enough.”
Jeffrey was shocked to his core at the calm speculation, the discussion of exterminating billions of innocent humans with a deadly pathogen.
“… And it incubates for a decade…” he murmured.
“That’s another one of the big lies. HIV can incubate for a decade — but that assumes that it is transmitted organically, with only a small amount of virus transferring from one person to the other. If there’s a heavy dose of virus transmitted, as in a vaccine, it can overwhelm the immune system in a matter of months. That’s one of the reasons the official accounts are nonsense. History shows that HIV can take ten years to develop into full-blown AIDS, and yet it became a global outbreak within a matter of a year or two. Like so much in the story, that should be impossible, because the spread would have taken a generation to reach the levels it did within a few years. Of course, the scientists ignore that aspect of it, because it goes into extremely uncomfortable territory.”
Schmidt wiped his face with the back of his sleeve, suddenly tired. “Whoever crafted this Spanish Flu variant undoubtedly had a reason to do it. I don’t have to tell you how troubling that is. There can’t be that many objectives that come to mind.”
“Wait. Why would you develop a virus that could annihilate a huge chunk of the population without any selectiveness? I would have thought that if it was for warfare, you’d want something reasonably precise. Isn’t this sort of like trying to thread a needle with a backhoe?” Jeffrey asked.
Schmidt sat back and grimaced. “There is a certain line of reasoning among social planners that the current population of the Earth is unsustainable. Seven billion people, all consuming resources and placing a burden, a load, on the planet, and that number growing every day. The prevailing sentiment in that circle is that it would take a reduction to under a billion to have a sustainable load. That would mean six billion would need to die. That’s the math. Of course they always avoid stating that in bald terms. They usually simply target an optimum number. But it works out the same. There are far too many people. So a lot of them have to go.”
“And this might be a way to decide which ones…”
“Exactly. If you had stockpiles of the vaccine, you could pretend to be working to develop one when the epidemic hit everywhere but at home, do so with amazing speed while immediately quarantining the country to keep the flu from entering the borders, and then blame the death of most of your adversaries, as well as the entire third world, on an inability to manufacture the vaccine fast enough. The survivors would go through a period of crisis, and then bury the dead and move on. And you could allocate the limited vaccine to friendly governments and those in your population you deemed worth keeping, allowing the rest to perish.”
“And make a fortune in the process, not to mention emerge as the leaders of the new world. It’s… it’s pure evil. Diabolical,” Jeffrey spat, still trying to get his head around the enormity of the act.
“Yes. Then again, that’s the business I was in. Building doomsday bugs. But this eclipses anything I worked on. It’s unspeakable. And it makes me relieved I’ll be dead soon. Because the world won’t be much good to live in after this. It’s every megalomaniac’s fantasy. A new world order, with the surviving leadership the emperors of whatever civilization is left. Hitler was thinking so small…”
“How would you disseminate it? You’d have a huge logistical problem, wouldn’t you?”
“Depends how contagious it is. If highly virulent, you could release it as an aerosol in major travel hubs, like Beijing, Moscow, Paris, Mexico City… or you could do the old vaccine trick. Inject it into the target populations along with something else. It wouldn’t be hard. If you’re capable of culturing enough to poison the global population, you’ve probably got the wherewithal to distribute it.”
The atmosphere in the room was leaden, the mood hopeless. The German tossed the notepad back to Jeffrey. “It doesn’t really matter what you do with the bio-weapons story, you know. There’s nothing you could do to stop this. It’s a lost cause.”
“I could warn people…”
“Warn them? That an old man thinks there’s a threat? You have to know you’d be laughed out of the room. And no news network would touch it. Assuming you weren’t killed the moment you opened your mouth.”
Jeffrey eyed the drawing a final time. “One person already has been.”
Schmidt nodded. “Who?”
“The man who gave me the material.”
“Then there’s your answer. It’s not theoretical. Of course they’ll kill to keep this quiet. We’re talking about wiping out huge swaths of the human race. What’s a few more?”
Jeffrey’s dour expression was that of a condemned man. He could smell the sour odor of fear seeping from his pores, and hated himself for it. His head had started pounding somewhere in the discussion, and now it felt as if a bear was swatting it like a beehive.
“He also gave me a dozen pages of spreadsheets. But they’re just long columns of numbers. Meaningless to me. Would they mean anything to you if I could recreate them?”
“Recreate? What about the copies he gave you?”
“They’re gone. Everything was destroyed.”
“Then no, I couldn’t do anything. Even if you could duplicate them, even one number out of place or one error could significantly alter the thing. And twelve pages of numbers? Forget about it.”