by W. Fraser Sandercombe

Radford never questioned the moral or the legal implications of what he was preparing to do.

He watched through the glass partition as his assistant, Cheryl Flynn, attached the last remote sensor, then sat down at the console, accessing the program. The wall in front of him was a multi-screen monitor, each screen revealing a different area of cellular activity in the subject, all magnified, at the moment, one hundred thousand times. The system was capable of observing and recording images at a magnification rate of well over six hundred thousand times.

The subject, Elizabeth Jenkins, had been in an automobile accident twelve years ago. She was on life support for spleen and kidney damage, and in a coma. Her brain activity was still strong but her husband had been demanding that the hospital in San Francisco, where Radford's sister was a nurse and where Radford was a staff consultant, pull the plug on her. Radford had been aware of the case for years. His sister, knowing his needs, had called to apprise him of the situation. He arranged a meeting at the hospital with Jenkins.

After a curt greeting, Radford got right to the point. He said, "Mr. Jenkins, I wonder if you'd consider allowing your wife to participate in my research."

"She's suffered enough. I want the plug pulled."

"According to one of the nurses, what you really want is to marry another woman. I can understand why you might not want to divorce Elizabeth. It wouldn't exactly look good, would it, for you to be divorcing your comatose wife?"

Jenkins glared at him and Radford continued, "In any case, what I propose is that we move Elizabeth to my private facility and that you allow me to involve her in my research."

Still glaring, Jenkins did not reply.

Radford waited.

Eventually, Jenkins said, "What research is that?"

"I specialise in viral infections, specifically, HIV."

"Elizabeth doesn't have AIDS."

"I know that."

"But what good..." Jenkins began. He locked eyes with Radford and thought he understood. He whispered, "You want to give her AIDS?"

Radford raised an eyebrow.

Jenkins told him where to shove it.

Instead, Radford slipped a business card into the man's jacket pocket and said, "Call me at the clinic if you change your mind."

A week later, faced with a long court battle to get Elizabeth un-hooked, and no guarantee of success, he called. Papers were signed and Elizabeth Jenkins was moved to the lab section of Radford's offices. Many years ago he had bought a large house in Half Moon Bay, renovating it, opening a clinic in the front, creating a research facility that spread throughout the rest. The clinic was open two days a week. The lab seemed to operate twenty-four hours a day.

Radford stared at the screens, took a deep breath and signalled his assistant. The system and the program, the hardware and the software, were new, perhaps some of the most sophisticated anywhere, developed over the last decade by Radford and a revolving team of associates, financed, initially, by Radford's personal wealth. When he realised he did not have enough money to go all the way himself, he solicited a series of large, public and private grants. The set-up was designed to monitor, record and analyze everything and anything that happened in the body as it went to war with a viral infection. If possible, it would also suggest natural or genetically manipulated cures and preventatives. Creating the sensors had provided the breakthrough that made all this possible. The micro-scanners identified and transmitted all the data from the subject to the computer while providing a digital-vid record.

For the system's test run, they started Elizabeth with the injection of a simple cold virus. At first, little happened. The virus entered a cell. Unseen, it reprogrammed the DNA in the cell, forcing the cell to create clones. When the clones tore through the host cell, patrolling phagocytes found the debris and began to devour it, ingesting viruses at the same time.

The clarity on the screens was such that Radford would have thought he was watching a simulation had he not known otherwise. To increase the feeling of "being there", he donned the small headset. He turned down the volume. Singing blood and breathing sounds were reduced to barely audible whispers. Off and on during the next few days, he viewed the war from the most immediate vantage point possible.

At first, the phagocytes, the scavenging clean-up squad, were unable to get the viruses fast enough and the invaders continued to infect new cells. Then a specialist, the macrophage, arrived, reaching out a pseudopod, seizing a virus. It extracted an antigen and attached it to its body surface where it was spotted by roving lymphocytes, the T-cells. They identified the virus and fired up the killer T-cells to destroy the cells that had been invaded by the virus, and the B-cells, which started the production of antibodies to destroy the viruses as the killer T-cells flushed them from the host cells. When the virus was conquered, a third type of T-cell called off the attack, while memory T- and B-cells remained in the blood in case the same virus should invade again.

When it was all over, Radford sat back, exhausted. The sensor array had worked perfectly with the program, allowing it to record the entire process as it occurred in Elizabeth's body. Radford set the computer to begin analyzing the data, then went to the outer office for a coffee.

It would require most of the day for the computer to analyze the processes that went on during the battle and compare them to all the current information about the human immune system. At the very least, new information would emerge. Brain patterns, cell activity, even atomic and sub-atomic exertions would be appraised. Something, perhaps many things, about the immune system that had hitherto gone unnoticed would be revealed.

When that was done, Elizabeth would be injected with HIV. The program would reveal even the most minute differences between what happened during a Rhinovirus invasion and an HIV invasion. It was well-known that when HIV developed into AIDS, it attacked and crippled the immune system itself by destroying T-cells, thus allowing other viruses to invade with impunity. But this program would act like a telescopic site on a long-barrelled rifle, aiming all cure research in a reliable direction. In fact, it might even suggest an immediate answer, a genetically manipulated anti-body, a protein, something that would be able to stop AIDS before it developed.

He realised the process could take a long time. The virus might lie dormant in Elizabeth's body for months or even years. But, eventually, something would trigger it. Radford would be watching.

Perhaps, like most epidemics, AIDS would simply go away. Perhaps human behaviour would change enough to control it. Or perhaps people would develop an immunity to it. But what if none of those scenarios occurred? Developing a cure or, more likely, an inoculation, had to be paramount. After Elizabeth Jenkins was injected and the analysis began, Radford wanted to get a wild chimpanzee from Africa through the black market, one of the ones that could carry HIV without getting AIDS. He would also attempt to procure a blood sample from certain Africans who were supposedly immune to HIV. Armed with data from these sources, it should be possible to figure out either a cure or a preventative.

As Radford drained his coffee cup, Cheryl Flynn knocked on the door to his office, then walked in, saying, "Mike, we picked up some really strange readings here. The computer interprets them as electromagnetic waves but they're on a sub-atomic level. Some sort of sub-atomic radio waves."

"We don't know what they are?"

"They've never been recorded before."

"Do we know their source?"

"According to the computer, there're two sources," she said. "One is outside the body. Those waves are picked up by the virus. The other is between the viruses themselves."

"Are you telling me that they're communicating with each other? And that something from the outside is communicating with them?"

"That's how the computer reads it."

"Christ," he whispered. "But..."

She shrugged her shoulders and sat down across from him.

Radford just stared at her. Flynn had been in charge of the programming, the engineering and the creative teams assembled to design the program. She knew the entire system better than any other single person. He didn't think it was possible for her to misinterpret what the computer was telling her.

He asked, "Is it possible that the program is misreading the information?"

"Anything's possible, Mike. Ask me if it's probable."

"But that's ridiculous. You're suggesting that a virus invasion is a co-ordinated attack."

"I'm not suggesting it. The computer is."

"Can we trace the source of the waves?"

"We can try."

"Can we interpret them?"

"We'll try to do that too."

"Okay. We'll postpone the next experiment with Elizabeth. Let me know the second you find out something."

When she was gone, Radford tapped out a beat on his deskpad with a pen. He glanced at his watch, sighed and left his office. He had a consultation scheduled at the hospital. It would have been a simple matter to use the phone system but the doctor he was dealing with up there insisted on his physical presence. He unplugged his Chevvy Starburst and drove up the coast. Three hours later, Flynn paged him in San Francisco and he called the lab.

As Flynn activated the screen, he said, "What's up?"

"The computer is comparing the waves to the actions that follow them and trying to interpret them that way."

"You didn't page me for that."

"No. The origin of the waves, what the computer is calling the directing force, is somewhere in the north, maybe as far as the Arctic. If I tap into someone's uplink and get the use of a satellite, I could probably track the waves right to their source. We have some of the most sophisticated hardware and software around. It's likely I could tap in without getting caught. But there is a possibility that someone will detect us and I don't want to make the decision on my own."

"What do you have in mind for when you locate the source?"

"Try to communicate with it."

"Do it. I'll be back in an hour or so. See you then."

Radford broke the connection, finished his consultation and returned to the lab.

"How are you making out?" He asked.

"It's under permanent ice on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. All I can tell you is that it's bullet shaped, about the size of a football, and it's been there one helluva long time."

"And it's sending out these electromagnetic waves."

"In all directions, like a radio beacon."

"Can we communicate with it or tap into it?"

"I'm working on it."

"I don't suppose there's any way we could physically reach it?"

She shook her head. "We couldn't. As I said, it's under the ice, and it's underground. And I wouldn't want to bet money on our chances of convincing someone that it ought to be dug up." She accessed the data regarding the object and said, "According to this, it's at least two million years old."

"Like viruses. We've found viruses that were frozen in the ice over two million years ago."

"Yeah, like that."

"Cheryl," Radford said, sitting down beside her at the console. "What do you think of this?"

"I don't think anything. I don't want to think anything. And I'm not going to think anything."

Radford chuckled.

Flynn grinned at him, then turned back to the console. "Damn," she whispered.

"What?"

"We've tapped into it."

"And?"

"And we're interpreting it. Put on the headset."

Radford cocked an eyebrow at her, then picked up the hardware, settling it onto his head, blinking it on. He was disoriented for a moment, dizzy, swaying on the edge of a great height, vertigo threatening to plunge him over the edge. Blackness rushed up to meet him, exploding into a swirling mass of colour. More dizziness followed when he realised some of the colours had never been viewed by human eyes before, realised that somehow his colour perceptions must have been altered, otherwise his eyes could never have seen those colours. There was another rush of darkness, thinning into shadow. He recognised that some of the transmissions from the - probe? - probe were battle directions while others were creative, inventive, designed to help various viruses mutate into new forms that people would, initially, be unable to combat. The cycle seemed endless. Radford felt icy prickles across the back of his neck, a shiver down his spine. He wanted to break contact with the probe but sank into it deeper, tracing its history. Initially, it had been in orbit. Viruses had been its mini-probes, sent to invade the planet's life forms and transmit data, which was relayed by the main probe to its home world. Once each virus had transmitted a certain amount of data, it died. Others took over. Then trouble broke out in the probe's home galaxy. The deep space receivers were lost in a distant alien war. The probe's orbit eventually decayed and it crashed in the high Arctic, damaging, corrupting its mandate program. It began to broadcast slightly different instructions, not allowing the viruses to die before cloning themselves, mutating themselves. The probe decided that it, the same as its builders, was at war. Viruses became self- perpetuating infections. Each time a cure for one was discovered, each time the host created its own cure, the viral probes would mutate and, eventually, re-attack. Recently, the probe had begun to design a new form of viral attack, one that, instead of being an illness in itself, disrupted the body's defence systems so that other infections could invade and destroy.

Radford tried to break contact and could not control his limbs, struggling to lift his arms.

Flynn yanked the headset from Radford as his body began to tremble, then thrash, bucking in the seat, arms and legs flailing.

Freed, he collapsed backwards, gasping. When he could speak, he said, "Somehow, that thing figures we're the enemy. It's been trying to destroy us for centuries, millennia."

"I'd say that, just now, it was trying to get you directly."

He nodded his head, wiping sweat from his brow. "It kind of felt like that. Like it was trying to control me."

Radford summarised for her what he had learned during his brief contact with the probe, finishing with, "Any ideas?"

"Can we talk to it?"

"Not through the headset again. That's too direct."

"Perhaps we can reason with it," Flynn suggested. "I think we can duplicate its waves. Maybe we can convince it to stop trying to kill people. Either that, or we try to make someone believe us and induce them to dig it up and destroy it physically."

"What are the chances?"

"Communication would be our best bet."

"Just before you unhooked me," Radford said, "I had a glimpse of a new infection that's on the way. This one's related to AIDS but it's more efficient. It doesn't need to enter through the bloodstream and it'll live longer without a host. It's airborne. And it's so virulent, death could occur in less than seventy-two hours. Do you know what that means?"

They stared at each other for a very long moment. Eventually, Flynn said, "We better try to talk to it, convince it we aren't the bad guys. Meanwhile, we can start feeding this information into every Net we can access. Somebody, somewhere, will make their own verification, maybe get the ball rolling in a different direction, maybe convince somebody to destroy the probe."

Radford sighed and stood up, knees trembling. He gazed through the glass at Elizabeth Jenkins. Blue and green machine lights lit her pretty, silent profile. She could go back to the hospital now. Her husband wasn't going to get his wish. She would have to die in her own time, at her own speed...

"Cheryl," he began. "We analyzed everything going on in Ms. Jenkins body, didn't we?"

"Well, we recorded everything. We haven't actually analyzed all the data yet."

"Let's see if we can do something to help her," he suggested, turning away from Elizabeth. He sighed again. He had been badly shaken by his contact with the probe but he could feel his determination returning. "Right, then, Cheryl. Start feeding this information everywhere, while we try talking to the probe. Somehow, we'll persuade it we aren't the enemy."