Antarctica

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Chapter Four

Veronica Ashford was undoubtedly the most knowledgeable person in the world about the Progenitor virus, and yet she often felt like she knew nothing. When the African Expedition team returned to England much earlier than planned, with a discovery no one could ever have anticipated, Veronica immediately bullied her way into joining the new team assigned to study the mysterious sonnentreppe flower. Despite the dangers, it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to study something truly new and exciting.

Unfortunately, all their early studies and experiments had been inconclusive at best, and contradictory at worst. The flower’s genetic makeup and biological functions defied known science. Ultimately, the lab in England simply was not equipped to properly study the virus, and the scientists on the team were not specialists in that area of research. What they needed was a much more advanced lab, located away from populated areas, with a team of virologists and geneticists.

Now, several years later, Veronica was in charge of just such a team. However, progress was still very slow, and almost the entire team had a significant amount of catching up to do. Much of the early work in England was discarded as unreliable. In many ways, Veronica felt that they were basically starting from scratch.

The entire team, all eight of the other scientists currently at the lab, were gathered around a computer screen showing the introduction of the Progenitor virus into a living cell. They had to guess at some of the processes taking place, because sadly the magnification was not enough for them to make out much detail. They already knew the basics. The Progenitor functioned like other viruses – infecting the cell and using it to produce more copies of the virus. Doing so interrupted many of the functions of the cell, and led to the death of the host. But the virus, by some mysterious method they were still trying to uncover, kept the cell from dying completely, and restored some semblance of life.

“What I don’t understand,” said Lewis Forsythe, as he stood watching the video. He paused for a moment, thinking, and then shook his head. “Okay, I don’t really understand any of it. Complete cell death of a human being takes hours after clinical death. After someone dies, many of their cells are still alive for a short time. But individual cells remaining active doesn’t mean the rest of the body can become fully animated. I just can’t make that connection.”

Maurice Aubrey, standing off to the side, crossed his arms thoughtfully. “We can attach electrodes to an amputated limb and make the muscles contract. They knew that over one hundred years ago. Lack of brain activity, but the continuation of nerve impulses independent of the brain, could result in someone who is medically dead but still animated. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Lazarus reflex. This could be a much more complex version of the same phenomenon.”

Of all the members of the entire team, Aubrey had accepted the realities of the Progenitor virus the easiest. He was a very pragmatic sort of man. Once he saw the evidence and heard the first-hand reports from Veronica and Alexander, he had accepted it without much resistance. The other scientists were somewhat more reluctant. It was hard for them to believe something that flew in the face of everything they had been taught, everything they believed was an immutable fact of nature.

“Making muscles reflexively contract isn’t the same as making an entire body get up and walk around,” Forsythe said. “That requires physical coordination and balance. It can’t be just an involuntary reflex.”

“Most of the time,” Aubrey granted, “but walking can be nearly automatic, right? If you’re deep in thought, you can walk without thinking about it at all. It can be almost like a reflex. Something our brains are so accustomed to that it can happen without us actively doing it.”

“But you still need to actively choose to start walking. We’re talking about a clinically dead body standing back up and starting to walk. That’s not just a reflex action. I can accept a body exhibiting the Lazarus reflex, performing some involuntary movement like flapping its arms or flexing its fingers, but not walking around. Next you’ll tell me an animated body was dancing the tango.”

A few others gave a chuckle, but Forsythe wasn’t really trying to make a joke. Neither was he actually arguing against the known facts. He was just making the same point many of them had been making for several days now. Some of the team members simply nodded in passive agreement, or tried to come up with a counter-argument.

It had been two weeks since Alexander’s fateful presentation, and the entire science team had been engaged in conversations like this since before they had even left the conference room. It was the only topic of discussion, both at work and also during their recreational time. They had all seen the data, spoken to Veronica and Alexander, who had been there since the beginning and seen the virus’s effects first hand, and watched the various recordings made of animated test subjects. But seeing didn’t always mean believing.

Veronica let them take their time accepting the reality of the Progenitor virus. Even she had needed some time to come to terms with it. As long as it didn’t interrupt with their work, and they didn’t simply refuse to accept the facts, she let them talk. It gave her a chance to see their thought processes, let them work through the problems, and also worked as a team-building exercise.

“People can sleep-walk,” Vanessa Montanari said. She was seated in the corner with her hands in her lap. “Couldn’t we consider that a form of walking that’s fully involuntary? What if the animated body is doing something similar to sleep-walking?”

“Or it’s like a form of muscle memory,” Roger Cartwright added.

“We still have control over involuntary actions, at least some of the time,” Forsythe said. “Take breathing, for instance. If I actively think about my breathing, I can choose to breathe faster or slower, or I could hold my breath. Breathing only becomes involuntary when we don’t think about it.”

“Animated bodies don’t breathe, though,” Montanari said.

“Well, they don’t need to,” Aubrey replied, smiling.

Montanari leaned forward and said, “But if these animated bodies are walking because of muscle memory, or involuntary movement, or whatever you want to call it, then shouldn’t they be trying to breathe as well? That should be a reflex action, even moreso than walking.”

Aubrey pursed his lips in thought and nodded, “That’s a good point, actually.”

Forsythe agreed as well. “I could understand an animated body trying to breathe, that actually does make sense. But getting up off the ground and walking?”

Geoffrey Underhill, one of the other British scientists, said in the brief pause that followed, “And besides, that still doesn’t explain the … uh, aggressive nature of the animated bodies.”

All of them had heard the story from Alexander during the meeting. The first scientist to be infected with the Progenitor, the tragic Irving Paternoster, had become savagely violent in those terrifying moments after his apparent death. He had attacked the other scientists on the expedition team and even tried to bite them. It was a miracle that he had not managed to infect anyone else.

They literally had to fight him off, and tried desperately to restrain him. But one of the local guides they had hired to lead them to the cave was armed with a pistol as protection against wild animals. That man had shot Irving in the head in self-defense. Veronica was eternally glad she had not been there to witness it.

“Exactly,” Forsythe said. “That’s what I’ve been saying. We can’t simply write off these behaviors as involuntary, reflex actions.”

Marcelo Calderón, the scientist from Spain and youngest person on the team, gave Forsythe a questioning glance. “If it is not reflex, then the actions are intentional. And if they are intentional, then that implies these infected people have some kind of agency, and if that is the case …”

“I’m not saying that,” Forsythe said, just a bit defensively.

Thankfully, Aubrey spoke up. “No one is saying that. Every test we can perform has confirmed that infected individuals have no brain function. They have no pulse and no respiration. They are completely, biologically dead.”

“And no one has found evidence that they perform other behaviors,” Cartwright said. “No attempts at speech or communication, no mimicking of other actions. They can stand and walk, and they can grab things and bite. Very rudimentary kinds of actions. If there is some kind of limited cellular function going on, a few stray brain synapses still firing, then I can imagine something like this being possible. Or at the very least, I can imagine that it’s not impossible.”

“I agree,” Aubrey said. “The infected body is being animated by some kind of biological mechanism that we haven’t identified yet. That’s the only solution that fits the facts. It’s either caused by some secondary effect of the viral infection, or possibly its a latent mechanism from early in our evolution that the virus interacts with somehow.”

“That’s an interesting theory,” Cartwright said. “I hadn’t even considered that.”

“Well, we’re pretty sure the sonnentreppe flower has remained isolated and unchanged for possibly hundreds of thousands of years. There’s certainly a possibility that it’s reacting to some long-buried mechanism within our own DNA.”

Underhill looked at him, rather incredulously. “Are you suggesting that at one point, human beings remained animated after death, and we lost that ability during the course of our evolution?”

Aubrey merely shrugged. “Maybe, who knows?”

Forsythe said, “Well, I guess my next question is: are we literally discovering a new category of biological existence? If an infected body is not alive, but it’s being animated through some previously unknown cellular mechanism, can we really say that it’s dead? I mean, dead things don’t walk around. Should we come up with a new term to describe this?”

“I think ‘animated’ works fine for now,” Aubrey said.

“Resurrected?” Cartwright said. It was hard to tell if he was being serious.

“No,” Calderón replied. “Let’s not call it that. Resurrection means being returned to life, and the only person I know of who was resurrected was Jesus Christ. But whatever we call it, I think we have to consider some of the philosophical ramifications of this discovery.”

Until this point, Veronica had let the others talk. She sat at one of the work benches nearby, leaning on her elbow with a stack of reports in front of her. It was good to let them debate some of the issues, as long as they didn’t turn into arguments and get out of hand. So far it had remained very civil and technical, a spirited debate among scientific peers. But Veronica felt it was time to interrupt.

“I’m not concerned with the philosophical ramifications,” she said. Immediately, the others all turned to look at her.

“We’re not trying to figure the nature of the human soul,” she said. “Our job is to learn everything there is to know about the Progenitor. How the virus replicates, how it kills its host, and how the host becomes animated after death. Ultimately, our goal is to discover how the virus heals cellular damage, so we can use that knowledge to develop new medical treatments. Everything else is secondary.”

“But Dr. Ashford,” Montanari asked, “aren’t you curious?”

“No,” Veronica said simply. She sighed and shook her head. “I’m not a philosopher or a poet. I’m a scientist. We’re all scientists here. We study the world and learn how it works. I prefer to leave religion and the supernatural to others. If you want to speculate on it in your spare time, be my guest. But while we’re working in the lab, I want you all focused on studying the virus itself.”

All of them were. A few of them displayed minor ethical concerns, but they were quickly pushed out of the way. Once the team’s initial confusion and doubt regarding the Progenitor had passed, the entire team joined together in a common cause. Veronica, serving as both Research Director and individual team supervisor and primary motivator, ran the lab like a military camp. Projects and experiments were planned down to the minute, and everyone always had a task on hand and specific list of responsibilities. She understood the strengths and weaknesses of every member of the team, and balanced their skills with the work that needed to be done.

Veronica had never actually managed her own team before, but she was determined not to become the kind of administrator who spent most of the day in their office, supervising from a distance. She spent as much time as possible in the lab, working with the team, directing their efforts, overseeing their work, and learning everything she could about every aspect of the Progenitor. Her husband Alexander spent a few hours a day on the periphery of the lab, working on secondary tasks or providing assistance when needed, but most of the time Veronica was the sole authority within the lab complex, often working fourteen-hours days. She arrived in the lab before most of the others had gotten out of bed, and she remained at work after they had all gone back to their rooms for the day.

The expectations were impossibly high. To put it bluntly, Umbrella had invested a huge amount of money in their lab, and they expected results. Failure to make significant progress in their study of the Progenitor, and to provide marketable advances in science for Umbrella to sell and profit from, would result in the lab being shut down, probably the end of her career, and possibly the bankruptcy of the Ashford family. The other scientists would be faced with a slight detour in their career as they were transferred to other facilities, but Veronica had a much more personal stake in things. Alexander had risked everything to get this project off the ground, and Veronica knew that its success or failure depended very much on her.

Days passed, one blending into another, and the work continued.

“The scans are complete,” Gerald Clancy said, handing her some computer printouts. “Based on what we’re seeing, it looks like the plasma membrane remains the same as before. We can try to narrow down the timeframe, but the virus doesn’t appear to actively mutate the cell wall before it begins to heal the damage. Frankly, I find that remarkable.”

Veronica scanned the sheets with a careful eye and handed them back. “We won’t know for sure until we test more cell types. I believe that the virus adapts to each different kind of cell. Work with Cartwright and give me a plan for an extended test series by the end of the day.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She walked over to one of the computer stations and checked some of the current data, writing a few notes for later. Then she walked down the hall to one of the specimen observation rooms. In time, Alexander had promised her a larger animal area with more specimens, but it would have to wait until they started up construction again the following year.

Marcelo Calderón was in the room, standing with his arms crossed as he watched through several sheets of hardened glass into the specimen chamber. He glanced up as Veronica entered and gave her a short nod in greeting.

“What number is this one?” she asked.

“Twenty-one. Series twelve. So far the progression seems the same.”

“Good.”

Inside the chamber was a small brown rabbit. Like all their lab animals, it had been shipped from South America, but Veronica had requested a wider variety of animals from Africa if possible. Since the Progenitor had originated in Africa, it made sense to test it on animals from the same region, to see if there was any difference in how the virus behaved. Based on Aubrey’s personal theory, there was some speculation that latent DNA left over from some ancient evolutionary path might provide certain animals a level of immunity to the virus, but so far it was only wild guesswork.

What they already knew for a certainty was that the Progenitor reacted very differently to each new species of animal that it infected. This was not a huge discovery by itself, as there were many viruses that caused different symptoms in different species. But the Progenitor was no ordinary virus. There did not seem to be any major variation in how the virus behaved at a cellular level. Whether it infected a human being, a dog, a fish, a bird, or a rabbit, the general characteristics of the infection remained the same. The virus was somehow able to repair damage to the cells, while at the same time cutting off various biological processes that inevitably resulted in death. But on a larger scale, the infected hosts displayed wildly different phsyical characteristics as a result of infection.

Human beings, as the team learned during the African expedition, died within about two hours from the time of infection. Initial symptoms were dizziness, muscle weakness, confusion, and lethargy. Eventually the host would lose consciousness, and death followed soon after. Within minutes of death, the body would suddenly reanimate itself. But there was no physical change in the host, and no visible symptoms resulting from infection. The only physical change was the gradual decay of tissue, which was not noticeable until many hours later, and was not considered a symptom of the infection itself.

Animals, on the other hand, sometimes displayed dramatic physical changes. Some species of birds lost all their feathers very rapidly. Insects grew to several times their normal size and there did not seem to be a clear moment when death occurred. At least one breed of cat had all of its teeth fall out and die from severe hemorrhaging. Fish were an exception to the normal infection timeframe in that they did not appear to reanimate after death. Veronica and the other scientists had no idea why.

The rabbit currently occupying the observation chamber was dead, or very close to it. Veronica, like most professional scientists, treated lab animals as a cruel necessity in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and turned off the part of her brain that would despair at seeing an innocent animal suffer. But Veronica had never been friendly with animals in the first place, so it was perhaps easier for her than some of the others. She watched the small brown rabbit lay motionless in the chamber, sprawled on its side like it had been hit by a car.

“Time?” she asked.

Calderón glanced at a nearby computer monitor. “One hour, nineteen minutes, forty-four seconds.”

“All right.”

Rabbits, like most mammals, became animated after death and typically became aggressive. Like dogs, they also often lost chunks of fur and skin. Veronica checked the experiment data and nodded to herself. “After this one, move onto series thirteen. Make sure all the samples are logged. Tomorrow I want to start a detailed analysis of each experiment number in the series.”

“I was thinking about the method of infection.”

Veronica shook her head. “Not at this time. We need to keep it consistent. Some time down the road we’ll switch up infection methods, but we don’t have time for it now.”

There were so many possible lines of research and not nearly enough people to follow them all. Sometimes Veronica felt like she was standing in the middle of a giant maze with paths going in several directions. She had to choose one path in the hopes it might lead to the end, to an important discovery, while knowing that the other paths would lead to time-consuming and expensive dead ends. Every day she was faced with such problems, and every day she powered on and kept the team moving forward. She had no time for delays and no patience for indecision.

The team respected her for it. Early in her career, Veronica had worked for scientists and supervisors that constantly changed their minds and altered the parameters of the experiments on short notice, causing confusion and frustration among the team, not to mention wasting time and effort. Veronica was determined to stick by her decisions and give her team the support they needed to keep their research moving in the right direction. She tried to micro-manage them as little as possible, but with a relatively small team like theirs, it was inevitable that she would have to do it sometimes. Her overall goal was to keep everyone moving forward with a clear goal in mind, discovering new information about the Progenitor, and not backtracking or re-doing experiments unless absolutely necessary.

One aspect of the Progenitor that they had studied from the very beginning was the possibility that more than one strain might exist. The Progenitor, like all viruses such as the common cold, could potentially mutate and evolve to create varying strains. At this time, they were only sure of the original Progenitor that existed with the sonnentreppe flower, but Veronica believed that as more animals were infected and studied, they would discover variations and changes in the virus. She had programs planned out where the research teams would each handle one strain of the virus, experimenting with different methods and lab animals, in the hopes of narrowing down and even isolating certain symptoms until they developed a less-lethal form of the virus.

But that was understandably a long way away. Before they could do any of that, they had to learn the basics of the virus itself. The virus had existed in nature for probably thousands of years with very little evolutionary change, since its environment had remained stable and it had not been exposed to a wide variety of new hosts. Veronica hoped that an influx of new biological material and changes in its environment might even accelerate its evolution.

She returned to the main lab and took a moment to survey the scene. Everyone was hard at work, writing on lab sheets, typing on computers, looking into microscopes, or checking on one of their machines. Overall, Veronica felt she had a strong team, and so far everyone seemed to be working together well and performing their duties admirably. But there just weren’t enough of them. If they were going to make real progress in their research, they would need twice as many scientists, or ten times as many.

Veronica liked to imagine a future, perhaps only a few years from now, when the facility was expanded and fully staffed with over one hundred expert researchers in over a dozen teams, performing thousands of experiments on various strains of the Progenitor, with Veronica in charge of the entire operation. And eventually, once the secrets of the Progenitor were finally revealed, a seismic change in modern biological science. The Umbrella Corporation would become the world-leader in medicine and pharmaceuticals.

And her name would be right there in big letters. The revolutionary nature of their research, and the vast potential of the treatments it would create, would make Veronica the most famous scientist in the world. She would almost certainly get the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Veronica did not deny her own ambitions. As a woman working in a field that was still very male-dominated, she had faced sexism and discrimination, although admittedly not as much as some other women experienced. Her marriage to Alexander had ended much of that, and given her opportunities that few others could claim, and she did not deny that either. But Veronica was determined to not simply have a successful career in science. She was not content to spend her life doing mundane work in some obscure government lab, earning a paycheck but not doing anything truly important. She wanted so much more than that.

Veronica wanted to change the world.

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