“HBRS-15.21 has no natural relative. It is neither a prokaryote nor eukaryote. It is an entirely synthetic lifeform, and therefore has no organic counter. We were the ones to create it, and only we can be the ones to stop it.”
–Dr Ava Sherman. Geneva, Switzerland, 10 Days After.
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Had Liam survived all this time for this?
The impact was only starting to weigh in. He had spent his day in perpetual whiplash, jumping from one shock to the next like a skier bouncing off moguls, and now was perhaps the first chance he’d had to truly contemplate the severity of his circumstance. Since Mother had left to conduct her tests, and Kurt was outside on guard duty, Liam had been left alone, with nothing but his idle mind for company.
The world had died in his absence. Liam had been gone for twelve years, and in the time of his isolation, all of his fears had been vindicated. Nobody ever came for you because there were no people left, he reflected. All the lies he’d told himself late at night, all the optimism he had forced into his mind, and it had just been the delusions of a marooned madman.
Everyone was dead. His friends. His studio. His agent. His consultants. His audience. His family.
No, he couldn’t consider that. If even Lilith and Nelly were gone too… If they had become those things… What would be the point of life then? Why should he continue this cruel game?
Mother entered the room. For a moment and in the shade of the dark, she almost looked human, dressed in a clean, white lab coat, and with a stethoscope hanging around her neck. But then she flipped the lights of the room on, and the pallid skin became apparent, along with the blackish lips of the dead, and inhuman, purple eyes. She walked closer, and Liam spotted a layer of dust on the stethoscope. The damned thing must’ve not been used in years.
“Good news, Mr Fenix,” she said. “In spite of your condition, you’ve managed to stay in relatively good health. Though your iron is low, it isn’t deficient, and while you’re underweight, with a proper diet, you will be back to normal in less than a week. That concussion appears to have lessened as well, but you’ll still need to be careful…”
She started to measure his heart rate and blood pressure while continuing to talk about his vitals, and Liam drifted off. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to listen to anymore of this drivel. He wanted to be back home, in his own bed, with his daughter in his arms and wife by his side. He wanted to have been justified for struggling so hard and for so long.
He just wanted this nightmare to end.
“Are you listening to a word I’m saying?” Mother asked.
Liam snapped back. “Sorry, you lost me there for a second. I’m just a little tired.”
“I know this is difficult, but you have to pay attention. Infection is the highest risk to your safety right now. You have to understand what you’re dealing with if you want to survive.”
There that word was again. Survive. How much longer would he be subjected to its oppression?
He needed to keep his mind distracted. “You seem to be the most knowledgeable around here, so tell me then. What am I dealing with? How does a pandemic like this occur?”
“Have you ever heard of Aeon Dynamic?”
“It rings a bell.”
“They were a large pharmaceutical company that researched evolutionary biology and life-extending technology. One of their concepts involved applying the mathematical model of cellular automaton to replicate microorganic behavior in humans post-mortem, using a synthetic biological agent that mirrored the environment of neighboring cells while simultaneously developing its own neural network. The process became known as the ‘Human Biophysical Recovery System’, or HBRS for short. The agent responsible for the outbreak was the 15th generation developed, and 21st iteration of that generation, or HBRS-15.21.”
Liam blinked back the avalanche of scary-sounding words. “Could you do me a favor and explain this for the layman? I never went to college.”
Mother stared into nothing, as a teacher might before giving a lesson. “Consider the nature of a living cell for a moment. They are ordered chemical systems designed to survive in otherwise chaotic environments. The more effectively that cells can remain ordered, the longer they are considered ‘alive’. All living cells follow this pattern, from the smallest bacterium to the largest mammal. Humans are no exception.
“But while this basic premise allows for life to occur, it also carries a fundamental flaw: the chaotic nature of the universe itself. Regardless of how much order an organism can develop, entropy will continue to rise, and the end result will always be the same. Chaos overwhelms order and the cell dies. You could say that chaos is the force of death.”
The shadows passed over her wrinkled face. “Which was why Aeon Dynamic created the concept of the ‘pseudo-cell’. Where living cells are ordered systems designed to survive in chaotic environments, pseudo-cells are chaotic systems designed to operate only in ordered environments. The tiniest of chemical variations surrounding a pseudo-cell causes massive structural alterations, if not outright destruction. Their design must therefore be fine-tuned and their ecosystem chosen with great care, lest they collapse under their own chaotic weight.
“HBRS-15.21 accomplishes this goal. Using cellular automaton, Aeon imprinted this pseudo-cell type with a series of biochemical triggers such that it would radically adapt to whichever organ it resides within. In any context other than the human body, HBRS-15.21 falls apart, but so long as there are adjacent human cells, it can absorb, modify, and replicate, folding its semi-porous membranes like facings on a Rubik’s Cube. With each chemical change, another manipulation occurs, and the overall structure becomes more stable, until it has mimicked the behavior of nearby host cells.”
Liam squinted. “I think you’ve lost me again. What do Rubik’s Cubes have to do with this?”
She paused. “Think of HBRS pseudo-cells as if they’re stem cells. They don’t ‘know’ anything other than what their neighbors are doing, and they change their behavior based on that. One might mirror a lung cell, another might copy a muscle cell, and another might bridge the neurological gap in between. The key difference between HBRS and normal human biophysics is that it continues to animate the body even after the host cells have long since died out.” She smiled. “One might fairly call this phenomenon ‘undeath’. We are neither living nor dead, but in a suspended state in between.”
He sighed. “You keep acting like you’re no longer alive, but you still seem intelligent enough. Why don’t you just return to your old homes and live the way you used to?”
Mother frowned. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way. During the process of resurrection, some parts of the brain are damaged beyond repair.” She stared at a small bite mark on her wrist. “It’s strange, I’ll admit. Procedural, semantic, and declarative memories can all come back, but there isn’t a single rezzer around who’s personal or episodic memories have recovered.
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“I can tell you how a heart works without being prompted. I can get in a car and turn it on. I can look at a tree and know the word. But if you asked me for my own name? Nothing. The only way for me to know is for someone else to tell me. And the same goes for everything else about my family, my friends, and myself. HBRS-15.21 didn’t just rob me of my life. It wiped the slate clean.”
Liam frowned. “My wife and my daughter are still out there. I just know it. Are you really telling me that they’d never be able to recognize me in this state?”
Mother met his gaze in silence for a moment, her eyes hard. Liam’s heart sank as he contemplated the question further. Of all the creatures that he’d seen wandering the city, would he even be able to recognize them?
“No, they would never recognize you,” she said at last. “At least in their current state. Though I must now be frank, Mr Fenix. Roughly one third of humanity’s total population died during the first six months of the outbreak. Mind you, they weren’t infected. They were killed outright, whether by military force or the ensuing civil unrest. Of those that remained, only a fraction rebuilt enough intelligence to become rezzers. Most remained trapped as hollowed-classed infected indefinitely.
“That is why a cure is necessary. Until such a time where we no longer are subjected to HBRS-15.21, it will forever be impossible to regain our old lives. The only chance you’d ever have to see them is to work with me, and even then, there are no guarantees.”
None of what Mother said surprised Liam, but hearing the words out loud was at the cusp of what he could bear. His throat tightened and the tears came to his eyes, but he blinked them back before they could spring free and fall.
“I understand,” he said, burying the pain. “It’s best not to get too ambitious right now. I’m sure there will be plenty of time for all that, yeah?” Though he wasn’t sure if he believed it.
Mother set aside the stethoscope, pulled up a chair, and sat next to him. “I’m sorry, Liam. This must all be extraordinarily difficult for you to process. Take as much time as you need.” She put a hand on his leg.
It wasn’t what Mother was saying, nor was it the tone of her raspy voice, nor was it the fact that no one had said so much as “I’m sorry” until this very moment. It was the hand on his leg. Liam hadn’t had human contact for longer than he could remember. He supposed he still hadn’t. An eon in isolation later, and the closest he could get was the cold touch of a lifeless corpse on his knee.
Liam cried. Why must it all be so impossible? Did he truly deserve a fate such as this? He had spent so much time trying to reclaim all that he’d lost, he had used every skill in his arsenal to stand back up, and he had even flourished to such a degree as to not only survive, but to escape. And his reward for doing the impossible? Not the mythical homecoming that he had foreseen, but another hopelessly steep wall to scale.
The tears ran down his cheeks and snot spilled from his nose, and still he did not relent. Liam did not deserve to endure such hardship. It wasn’t his job to save the world. He was a television survivalist, and not an ounce more. Why must the odds always be so far stacked against him?
And so Liam cried and cried until he thought he had no tears left, and then cried a little more. Mother sat patiently, her cold, dead hand trying to massage the life back into his. The moment was as comical as it was depressing. The dead was all he had to give him life.
He wiped the wetness from his cheeks and blew his nose one last time. “Thank you,” he said. “I didn’t realize just how much I’d needed that.”
Mother nodded. “You’ve been through a lot, and there will be plenty more to come.”
“Yes, I know.”
She frowned. “I must warn you now that you do not.”
Here we go again. “What else could there be?”
“Right now, Leah is meeting with Hades, the leader of this city. He does not see things in the same way as me. He will do everything in his power to have you killed.”
Of course. Another trial to pass, another spin of the wheel. Would it ever end? “Can’t be worse than what I’ve dealt with until now, yeah?”
Mother suddenly studied him. “Why did you come back here, Liam? What drove you to put yourself at such risk?”
“My family,” he admitted. “I can’t live without them.”
“Good. Our interests are entwined then, as their lives are now dependent on yours. Only through your continued existence can you hope to see them again, in whatever form we find them.”
He shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand, but that isn’t good enough. I promised that I’d see them again. It has to be them, or there’s no point.”
“I do understand, more than you could know.” She stood. “I’m going to tell you a story now, and one that I’ve shared with no one else.”
Liam watched on as she paced the room.
“There was once a time where I wasn’t ‘Mother’. I’d been called a different name, and by different people. I only adopted that title as a primitive means of forging my own identity, free from their tyranny. The word had no meaning, save for that which I’d proscribed for myself. I didn’t know what a mother was.
“Until Evelyn. The infection was burning the world down and civilization was in its final death throes, but it was there that I encountered a young girl, barely in her teenage years. Evelyn was at the center of the storm. Isolated, orphaned, and with no hope of her own, just waiting for the end to come.
She tapped her hand against the window. “I could’ve left her to her fate, or consumed her for sustenance, but something stirred inside me the moment we made eye contact. Something I’d never felt before. It was my human self, Liam. It didn’t matter that I was an infertile cannibal trapped in this undead coil, nor did it matter that we had no relationship. Evelyn was a child in need of a mother, and I was a mother without a child. So I took Evelyn under my wing, and became Mother, in the true sense of the term. It all made so much sense after that…” She trailed off.
Her tone was different. Mother had been every bit of a professional until this moment, but there was a certain longing that bled through. The kind that Liam felt himself when he lay at night and thought of Lilith.
“What happened to her?” Liam asked.
Mother stared back. “What do you think?”
His cheeks reddened. “I’m sorry.”
“This is what makes what we’re doing so important, Liam. Let’s not lose sight of that fact. The past might be gone, but the future can still be saved.”
Liam rubbed the sweat from his brow. “What are you asking me to do?”
“Only as you’ve done until now. Survive. No matter the cost. However it must be done. Your life is more important than everyone else in this building. Morality is irrelevant to that end.”
“What about Leah?”
Mother looked out the window. There were bright floodlights on the horizon. “Leah will have her own decision to make. You have to assume that she’s an unreliable partner.”
“But she saved my life,” Liam pointed out.
Mother shuttered the window. “Leah is complicated. She is the oldest one of us still around, and has seen no shortage of the living rise and fall. I trust that she will do whatever she believes is right. I do not trust that it will be enough. Pandemonium is exactly as it sounds: a chaotic, myopic asylum for a misbegotten race. Whatever belief you may have about your own safety with her, that is far from guaranteed. She has her own interests to consider.”
Why can’t anyone just give me a break? “Seems like this is the last place for me to be then.”
“You are correct. Pandemonium is the absolute worst place you could have been brought.” She strolled across the room. “Kurt doesn’t know it, but I had a reason for picking this wing. There’s a fire escape that can take you to the ground floor, free from any checkpoints. I suggest that you use it, should the need arise.”
Liam blinked. “…And go where?”
Mother grinned. “You came back here with a purpose, did you not? Perhaps you should use that purpose to guide your path forward.”
Liam stared wide-eyed. This one really liked to take him for a ride. One minute, Mother was saying that his life was the most important thing in the world, and the next, she wanted him to run off on his own to get killed. Make up your bloody mind, already!
Mother went for the door. “I have to go now. Remember what we’ve talked about.” She stepped outside before he could get another word from her.
For a while, Liam simply sat and watched the back door exit. To step beyond its threshold alone was to sacrifice the security he’d been given, and trying to survive in this alien environment unassisted was a foolhardy endeavor, bordering suicide. Could he have really come all this way just to die doing something so misguided?
And yet, the more he watched the door, the more resolved he became. Mother had been right on one point. His instincts had gotten him to this point, and they screamed that Lilith and Nelly were still alive, regardless of what the others might think. So long as Liam could cling to that dream, nothing could stop him. He could climb this impassible cliff yet again.
Liam wrapped the balaclava back around his head and went for the exit, his luggage filled with food in hand.
Promise me, Nelly had said. It didn’t matter the odds, or the dangers, or the obstacles that would be in his way.
This was one promise he’d never leave unfulfilled.