Mother Russia

Chapter Seven

At approximately 2:00 in the afternoon the following day, Konstantin and Pavel were infected with a virus strain designated KLR-55, although neither of them knew it at the time.

It was Konstantin’s turn to operate the robotic arm, and he wasn’t thrilled with the idea. He frowned and put his hands on his hips as Pavel began to explain how it worked.

“This seems overly complicated,” he said. “Is this truly the correct procedure for moving these samples?”

“It is,” Pavel replied. “Technically, we don’t have authorization to handle the samples. Even Arkady doesn’t. So we have to use this robot.”

“They want us working with the samples, but we aren’t even allowed to pick them up?” Konstantin scoffed and shook his head. “This is absurd. Some big office executive thought up this nonsense, I swear.”

“Yeah, probably,” Pavel agreed. “But we have to do it this way. Oh, and I almost forgot, we should put our hazard suits on.”

Once they were dressed, Pavel let Konstantin take over control of the arm and practice moving it around. It was difficult for him to handle the joystick properly with the suit’s gloves, and he grumbled and swore about it.

Pavel said, “Just take your time. Me and Arkady had trouble with it at first, too.”

“We shouldn’t even be doing this,” Konstantin complained. “We’re scientists, not machine operators. They should have sent someone else to scan all these.”

“Well, they didn’t,” Pavel said with a shrug.

“Using this stupid controller is like playing a video game,” Konstantin said. “And I’m no good at video games.”

Pavel patiently showed Konstantin how to move the arm, and scanned two samples in a row to show him how it was done. After that, he let Konstantin take over, and the older man scanned two samples as well, although it took him twice as long.

“You think you got it?” Pavel asked. “The only real tricky part is putting them on the shelf.”

“I still think this is a waste of time,” Konstantin said. “We should just do it by hand. We have on these suits, right?”

Pavel said, “If you want to ask Arkady about it, then go ahead. I’m going to set up the new gene analyzers, but if you need me you can come get me, okay?”

“Yeah, sure,” Konstantin said.

For the next two hours, Konstantin methodically scanned one sample after another, but instead of getting faster as he went on, he got slower. It was time-consuming, mind-numbing work, and he struggled to keep alert. He kept fumbling with the tiny joystick and moving the arm in the wrong direction. Putting the samples on the shelf was definitely the hardest part, since you needed a light touch to set it down gently, and Konstantin didn’t have a light touch. Twice, he bumped the joystick too hard and the arm forcefully slammed the sample into its fixture. Each time it happened, Konstantin groaned in annoyance and took a short break.

Konstantin didn’t mind doing repetitive tasks. After all, most scientific work was inherently repetitive and boring. But at least that was science. This was just idiotic busywork. They could have trained a simpleton to do it. Konstantin hated to think that he was wasting his time doing work that some entry-level employee could handle.

A little bit after noon, Arkady showed up and took over so that Konstantin could go to lunch. The fact that his supervisor, a Senior Project Manager, was also spending time on such a boring task didn’t make it any easier for him. And when he returned, he counted and saw that Arkady had scanned almost as many samples in one hour as he had managed to scan in two.

He tried to go faster, but it was just too hard to control the joystick with his hazard suit on. It was like trying to play piano while wearing oven mitts. Finally, after nearly banging one of the samples against the computer scanner two times in a row, Konstantin gave up.

He unzipped his hazard suit and pulled it partially off, freeing his arms. He let top half dangle behind him and carefully tied the sleeves around his waist like it was a hooded sweatshirt. Then he began scanning samples again, and it went somewhat easier, but still not easy enough that he wasn’t frustrated the entire time.

Konstantin yawned and looked at the clock. It was a few minutes before 2:00, so he still had a few more hours to work on scanning the samples. He thought about trading jobs with Pavel, who should be the one doing this job anyway, since he was faster at it.

As he set sample KLR-55 into its fixture on the shelf, he once again bumped the joystick a bit too hard and it slammed the sample down with a bang. He sighed again in mild frustration, but it had happened so many times now that he didn’t think it was a big deal. But when he tried to move the arm back to grab the next sample, the arm didn’t move. He looked at the control screen, and then moved the joystick back, but nothing happened.

“What the hell?” he muttered. He looked at the screen but there were no warnings or flashing alerts, nothing to indicate there was a problem.

Konstantin walked over to the arm and looked across its length for anything that was jammed or stuck. He didn’t want to touch anything, for fear of the arm snapping back and hitting him. The arm still held onto the sample and was just stuck in place. Konstantin leaned close and peered at the robotic hand, and slowly realized what the problem was.

The hand had somehow gotten caught on the very edge of the plastic fixture that held the sample. The fixture was just a piece of transparent plastic with a shallow hole drilled into it, which the sample easily fit into. But when the arm banged the sample into place, it shook the arm just enough that the hand got snagged on the edge of the hole.

Konstantin hesitated and then grabbed the arm and tried to wiggle it loose. For a moment, he considered putting his hazard suit back on properly, but he didn’t want to waste more time. He put one hand on the sample and one hand on the arm, and tried to shake it free of the fixture.

The sample container was made of specially-hardened glass, but it wasn’t shatterproof, and it wasn’t designed to be handled roughly. The top of the container was a lid that clicked into place, and under most circumstances, would only be removed while the sample was in an enclosed environment for the purposes of an experiment. However, when Konstantin accidentally slammed the sample into the fixture, the lid came just slightly loose. When he grabbed the sample to pull the arm free, the lid lifted up, exposing the virus to the air. This was not supposed to happen, but it did.

None of the viruses based on the Progenitor were airborne, which was one of the few limitations to the virus’ extreme lethality. One of the greatest fears of the Umbrella scientists who worked with the Progenitor was that someday one of the strains would mutate into a purely airborne form. But even a non-airborne virus could survive in the air for a brief period of time. When Konstantin grabbed the sample, he shook it ever so slightly, and a tiny cloud of the virus puffed out of the container and drifted in front of his face and he breathed it right into his lungs.

Konstantin didn’t notice. “Damn it,” he muttered, letting go of the arm.

He went to get Pavel. A few minutes later, both of them were fiddling with the arm and trying to get it loose. Pavel didn’t have his hazard suit on either, and as he and Konstantin stood next to the sample shelf, Pavel breathed in a tiny amount of the virus as well.

“I’m going to power the whole thing down,” he said. “Then I think we can move it manually.”

He shut the system down and then walked back to the arm. Konstantin held onto one side and Pavel held the other, and together they lifted the hand up, letting the sample settle into place in the fixture. Neither of them noticed that the lid was still loose. They pushed the arm back and returned it to its neutral position.

“All right,” Pavel said. “Let’s turn it back on and see what happens.”

He powered the system back up and the arm rotated in a circle as the computer beeped and went through a series of diagnostic checks. Once it was ready to go, Pavel moved the arm and picked up the next sample, scanned it, and set it on the shelf.

“Stupid thing,” Konstantin said. “Do you think we should let Arkady know that it got stuck like that?”

“He’s not here,” Pavel said. “He had to go over to Building #4 for something. He told me he probably wouldn’t be back at all today. We can email him about it.”

Pavel went back to the other lab to finish his work, and Konstantin decided to take a quick break and get a cup of coffee.

The amount of the virus that Konstantin and Pavel were exposed to – called the viral inoculum – was rather low. But the viruses derived from the Progenitor were notoriously aggressive and could infect a host with even a tiny viral inoculum. Viral strain KLR-55 was no different. By the time Konstantin and Pavel left work a few hours later, the virus was already replicating rapidly in their bloodstream.

Viral strain KLR-55 had never been fully tested on human subjects, and many of its infection parameters were unknown, including the approximate time of infection until death, the method of secondary infection, and most importantly, the mutative qualities of the virus on a primary host. It had been developed from breeding infected fish, much in the same way that the T-virus had been developed from breeding infected leeches. The T-virus, like its parent virus the Progenitor, killed its host in roughly two hours. Had Konstantin and Pavel been infected with the T-virus, they would have been dead before they left work.

But strain KLR-55 had an unusually long time frame. An infected primary host would not even show symptoms for almost three hours, and then they would rapidly deteriorate and succumb to the virus between four and five hours after infection.

There were other differences. The T-virus could only spread through bodily fluids. Someone unknowingly infected with the T-virus could theoretically walk through a crowd of people and there was very little risk of anyone getting exposed to the virus. However, strain KLR-55 replicated easily in the host’s lungs, and could spread through exposure to breathing and coughing, not unlike other viruses like the flu or the common cold. By the time Konstantin and Pavel left work, they were capable of infecting almost any person they spoke to or stood in close proximity to, at least until they succumbed to the virus and stopped respiring altogether.

After work, Konstantin had to run some errands before we went home. He stopped at the bank and then to the pet store to buy special food for his cat. And then he went grocery shopping, and since it was Friday afternoon, the store was fairly crowded. By the time Konstantin finally made it home at around 5:30, feeling slightly light-headed and starting to develop a cough, he had infected more than one hundred people.

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