"Ow, butt-face!" Smooshy shouted from under Alan's bed.

"You really aren't in a position to be commenting on people's butts at the moment," Alan said.

"I was commenting on your face," Smooshy countered. "You're pinching me!" She added.

"The bed frame is pinching you," Viral said. He lifted the corner of the bed from the floor, doing his best to ignore the pending snap in his L-6 vertebrate.

From his knees Alan reached beneath the box spring searching for the hook on which Smooshy's underpants were caught. "I know I said it once before, and not in mixed company, but you've got a magnificent bottom," he commented.

"Not the right time, Alan," Smooshy said, her forehead buried in the carpet. Viral did his best not to peak.

"Why'd you have to hide?" Viral asked.

"We weren't sure about your sensibilities," Smooshy said.

Alan looked up toward Viral over his shoulder. "Because of the right wing Hindu fundamentalist thing," he said.

"I'm not a fundamentalist," Viral said, offended.

"Well that would have been good to know before butt-face here kicked me off the bed," Smooshy said.

"I didn't know you'd bounce of the wall and roll," Alan defended.

"That makes two of us," Smooshy said, pulling a strand of carpet fuzz from her lip.

As Alan continued to unweave the fraying Lycra threads of Smooshy's under pants off the rusted spoke on which they caught, he blamed Smooshy for her predicament. "All this could have been avoided if you'd just kept quiet," he said.

"I would have noticed eventually,' Viral said.

"Doubtful," came Alan"s response, muffled beneath the mattress.

From between wheezes let go trying to wriggle into the open, Smooshy defended herself. "Excuse me for not being able to stifle a groan when you turned into Jingoist Captain America. I could practically hear you making finger guns," she said.

"That's uncanny," Viral muttered.

Alan pulled his head out from beneath the bed. "I wasn't making finger guns," he protested. Turning to Viral, he whispered, "Who's side are you on, man?"

Viral nodded an apology. "Are you almost done?" He asked, "because my lower lumbar is going to need a stretch in a minute."

"Yeah, one more sec," Alan said, crawling back beneath the bed-frame.

"Don't tear the waist-band!" Smooshy called after him from beneath her armpit.

"Too late!"

Viral heard a pop. "Godammit," Smooshy said.

"You're good, boss!" Alan called.

Smooshy crawled from beneath the bed wearing Alan's undershirt. Sweat matted her bangs above her eyes. She pushed her hair back with one hand and cinched the torn strap of her lavender underwear with the other. "These were my favorite Gap Bodys," she said.

Viral dropped his corner of the bed and fell into a child's pose. Meanwhile, Alan reclined against the bed on the floor. Grinning, catching his breath, he said, "I got some Gap Body for you...ow!"

Smooshy kicked his shin then quickly caught her underpants before they slipped down her waist. "That's for punting me like a football," she said.

Alan exhaled through puckered lips as he rubbed his hands across his leg.

From his position on the floor Viral realized between the three of them he was the only one with pants on. "Um, do you want to borrow some shorts?" He asked.

"Why, I'd love to Viral. You're such a gentleman," she said.

"Top drawer on the right," he said, pointing behind him from his folded lotus. As she crossed to the dresser Smooshy delivered another kick to Alan's tibia.

"That's for the jingoistic rhetoric," she muttered.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"You know, you're only proving my point that Americans have an unreasonably hostile view of their government," he said. Smooshy feigned another kick and Alan balked, putting his hands up. She smirked.

"You Canadians are just too afraid to take a stand for principle," she said, opening Viral's drawer.

"Whether we're here to help with Operation Warp Speed, or whatever, or help the American government cover up a conspiracy, what does it matter? We have a job to do and we can either do it or not," Alan said.

Viral crawled out from his pose and sat cross-legged against Alan's side of the bureau. He looked up as Smooshy weighed whether to try on his track shorts or tighty whities.

"What's with you and the conspiracy theories?" Smooshy asked. "Just cause they filmed the X Files in your high school doesn't make you Fox Mulder."

Viral chose the moment to chime in. "Actually," he said, "That's what I came back to the room to talk to you guys about."

"Oh no, not another X-head," Smooshy said.

"Team Scully?" Alan asked.

"What?" Viral said, shaking his head. "No, about Operation Warp thing, whatever, and the chance that there's a conspiracy."

Smooshy let her underpants fall around her ankles as she slipped her feet into Viral's drawers. Viral fought to keep his train of thought. "Um," he stammered, looking up and to the right, pretending to catch dust in his eye lash. "Gyn and I were with Plank up in --"

"Wait, you found him?" Smooshy asked.

"Did you tell that dillweed about our bathroom door?" Alan challenged.

"Hold on, not yet--"

"What a sketch-ball," Smooshy said, sitting on Viral's comforter, clasping her hands between her knees.

"So he and Gyn, and Aleph got strains of Emir's broncheo-fluid, or something--"

"--alveolar lavage," Alan added. Aroused, Smooshy bit her bottom lip; Viral did his best not to notice.

Viral continued, "And Plank claims with certainty, with Aleph's endorsement, that the spike protein on the Wuhan virus has three specially targeted mutations."

"Specially targeted, what's that mean?" Smooshy asked, leaning forward on her elbows.

"I don't know exactly...Gyn was supposed to be here to help me explain it," Viral said.

"Where is she?" Alan asked.

"It's a long story," Viral said.

"What'd you do?" Smooshy asked.

"I didn't do anything!" Viral protested.

Smooshy and Alan shared a look. "He did something," they both said.

"The point is Plank found a dataset online that sampled the Covid genome and ran a comparison with an entire phylogenetic tree," Viral said.

"Already?" Smooshy asked.

"That's what I'm saying," Viral said. "Plank arrived at this conclusion that the most stable functional protein of any coronavirus just somehow happens to have three mutations that make it particularly effective against human cells--"

"But he didn't come up with this himself," Alan interjected.

"No," Viral said, "That's what's suspicious. Who would put information like that out there for everyone to find?"

Smooshy leaned back on her hands, blew her cheeks out and exhaled. "Hard to say, but if Ankur's access to the genome is any indication the academic community is proving to be uncharacteristically open source when it comes to info on this pandemic," she said.

"And why wouldn't they?" Alan asked. "Drastic times and all."

"You clearly haven't worked in academia," Smooshy said.

"It's weird, right?" Viral asked.

"It's unorthodox," Smooshy conceded.

"So where's the conspiracy?" Alan asked.

"That's the thing," Viral said, speaking more animatedly with his hands. "In one room Gyn confirmed the Wuhan virus is a combination of sorts between a bat virus and a human strain."

Alan snapped a finger gun toward Smooshy. "Told you," he said.

Smooshy rolled her eyes.

"But the combination," Viral went on, "Is almost too efficient to have been random."

Smooshy stood, began to pace. Viral kept himself from staring too long at her spray-tanned thighs. "And the three mutations on the spike protein that make it extra catchy, in concert with the non-random combination event--"

"Alleged," Viral interrupted.

"Whatever," Smooshy continued, "The mutations with the combination just happened to result in the most infectious flu virus in 100 years."

Clapping his hands together Alan said, "Well, this is good news, right? If the bug is man-made then someone's bound to have an antidote."

Smooshy tucked her leg beneath her on an armchair, chewed her fingertip in thought. "If it's man-made," she conjectured.

"You heard the probability stats," Alan pointed out.

"According to what source?" Smooshy asked.

"A random histogram on the internet," Viral said.

"To produce the conclusion of three specific mutations on an S-protein spike it couldn't be that random," Alan offered.

The three of them fell into a comfortable silence, each lost in thought specific to their domain. While Smooshy considered evolutionary biology, Alan busied himself with the mechanics of histamines in the blood. Viral untangled a thread in his mind that unspooled from the knitting point Alan offered with his comment.

In the same algorithms class with the professor who specialized in fuzzy math, the teacher had shared a lecture on the nature of randomness in two dimensions. Human beings, he argued, conceived of time as space, a distance between then and now. Between any two points in time sufficiently close almost any phenomenon could appear to be relatively chaotic. On the level of the macro, however, as x approached infinity, patterns often emerged. From the simplest algorithms of iteration complex fractals as random as the shoreline could appear. Within the scope of the universe, however, the Bay of Biscayne was as stochastic as a cracker -- utterly predictable.

Viral wondered, what if the algorithm Plank found actually had found him? He recalled Agent Treyna's warning before dinner, a smack upright Dr. Hackman's head, for browsing the internet unencrypted. Agent Treyna and Officer Avril had made a show of emphasizing that no one was to open or accept unverified tokens, requests, or documents through their web browsers or email clients. Treyna and Avril had confiscated their phones and tablets to be sure of it.

But the government sanctioned devices they were allowed to use kept sniffers out; they did not prevent anyone of them from bringing in a Trojan horse. The bureaucrats in charge had made sure no organic or computer virus could further impugne the team; Treyna had rented out the entire Ramada to be sure of that. But Viral realized with light-headedness that they had not been protected from the most insidious, infectious virus of them all. Plank had been infected by an idea; a new contagion was spreading, and without knowing, Viral was doing his part to propagate its vector.