The Girl with All the Gifts

55

Dr Caldwell unpacks the six Tupperware containers containing brain tissue from the male hungry at Wainwright House and lays them side by side on the newly disinfected surface in front of her. The lab worktops are made of a synthetic marble substitute which mixes marble dust with bauxite and polyester. It’s not as cold as real stone. When she momentarily lays her hot, throbbing hands on it, it offers her little relief.

She prepares slides from each of the samples. She doesn’t call the ATLUM into play for this, because Rosie still has no functional power source – and also because the material has been scooped out of the hungry’s skull with a spoon. It doesn’t lie in its natural layers, and little would be gained by slicing it so very finely.

She’ll need the ATLUM later, but not for these samples.

For now, she spreads tiny amounts of the brain tissue across the slides as thinly as she can, adds a single drop of staining agent to each, and drops the covers on with gingerly care. The bandages impede her movements, so this takes longer than it should.

Six tissue samples. Five available staining agents, which are cerium sulphate, ninhydrin, D282, bromocresol and panisaldehyde. Caldwell has the highest hopes of the D282, a fluorescent lipophilic carbocyanine with proven efficacy in throwing fine neuron structures into high relief. But she’s not going to ignore the other stains, since she has them to hand. Any of them has the potential to yield valuable data.

The natural thing to do now would be to power up the transmission electron microscope, which sits in the corner of the lab like the bastard offspring of a road drill and an Imperial Stormtrooper from the Star Wars trilogy – all white ceramic and smooth, sculpted curves.

But there’s that whole absence-of-power thing again. The microscope is not going to wake up and serve her until Sergeant Parks feeds it.

In the meantime, she turns her attention to the sporangium. The lab boasts a number of manipulator tanks, with two circular holes along one side. The holes are sphinctered. Elbow-length rubber gloves can be inserted through them and rendered airtight by a mixture of sealant gel and mechanical adjustments.

Once the sporangium is safely sequestered from the rest of the lab inside one of these tanks, Caldwell begins to examine it. She tries to open it with her gloved fingers and fails. Its outer shell is tough and elastic and very thick. Even with a scalpel it’s not easy going.

Inside, endlessly infolded, is a fine, fractal froth of spores like grey soap bubbles that spills out through the opening she’s made. Curious, she dips her finger in. There’s no resistance. Even as densely packed together as this, the spores seem to have no mass at all.

She becomes aware, while she’s doing this, that she’s no longer alone in the lab. Sergeant Parks has entered and is watching her in silence. He has his gun – not the rifle, but the sidearm – in his hand, as casually as such a thing can be carried in a civilised space such as a lab, where it has no conceivable place.

Caldwell ignores him for a while as she continues to cut carefully into the grey gourd to examine its interior structure.

“The good news,” she observes, her eyes and her attention staying on the contents of the tank, “is that the sporangium’s integument appears to be extremely resilient. None of the ones we saw on the ground had broken open, and it’s impossible to tear them open with your bare hands. They appear to require an external environmental trigger in order to germinate, and so far that trigger hasn’t materialised.”

Parks doesn’t answer. He still hasn’t moved.

“Did you ever consider a scientific career, Sergeant?” Caldwell asks him, still with her back to him.

“Not really,” Parks says.

“Good. You’re really far too stupid.”

The sergeant looms at her side. “You think I’m missing something?” he demands. Caldwell is very conscious of the gun. When she glances down, it’s there, directly in her line of sight. The sergeant is holding it in both hands, ready to fire.

“Yes.”

“What am I missing?”

She puts down the scalpel and withdraws her hands, very slowly, from the gloves and from the tank. Then she turns to look him in the eyes. “You see that I’m pale and sweating. You see that my eyes are red. You see that I’m slowing down, as I walk.”

“Yeah, I see that.”

“And you’re ready with your diagnosis.”

“Doc, I know what I know.”

“Ah, but you don’t, Sergeant. Not really.” She’s begun to undo the bandages on her left hand. She holds it up for him to see. As the white linen falls away, her flesh is laid bare. The hand itself is fish-belly white and a little puckered. Red lines begin at the wrist and climb her arm – climb downwards, since her hand is raised, but gravity’s no guide here. The poison is finding its way to her heart, and it pays no mind to the vagaries of local topography.

“Blood poisoning,” Caldwell says. “Severe inflammatory sepsis. The first thing I did when we arrived here was to give myself a massive dose of amoxicillin, but it’s almost certainly far too late. I’m not turning into a hungry, Sergeant. I’m only dying. So please leave me alone to get on with my work.”

But Parks stays where he is for a few moments longer. Caldwell understands. He’s a man with a strong preference for the sorts of problem that have a simple, unitary solution. He thought Caldwell was such a problem, but now he realises she isn’t. It’s hard for him to cope with the shift in perspective.

She understands, but she can’t really help. And she doesn’t really care. What matters now is her research, which – after so long a period of stagnation – is finally starting to look promising.

“You’re saying these fruit things aren’t dangerous?” he asks her.

Caldwell laughs. She can’t help herself. “Not at all, Sergeant,” she assures him. “Unless the prospect of a planet-wide extinction event troubles you.”

His face, as open as a book, announces relief, then confusion, finally suspicion. “What?”

Caldwell is almost sorry to have to burst the precious bubble of his ignorance. “I already told you that the sporangia contained the spores of the hungry pathogen. But you don’t seem to have taken in what that means. In its immature, asexual form, Ophiocordyceps toppled our global civilisation in the space of three years. The only reason it didn’t achieve global pandemic status at once, the only reason any pockets of uninfected humans were able to survive, was because the immature organism can only propagate – neotenously – in biofluid.”

“Doc,” the sergeant says, looking pained, “if you’re gonna talk like a fucking encyclopaedia…”

“Blood and spit, Sergeant. It lives in blood and spit. It doesn’t like to venture out into the open air, and it doesn’t thrive there. But the adult form…” She waves a hand over the innocuous white globe nestling at the bottom of the tank. “Well, the adult form will take no prisoners. Each sporangium contains, at a rough estimate, from one to ten million spores. They will be airborne and light enough to travel tens or hundreds of miles from their place of origin. If they float into the upper atmosphere, as some of them will, they could easily cross continents. They will be robust enough to survive for weeks, months, perhaps years. And if you breathe them in, you’ll be infected. You can see a hungry coming, but you’ll have a harder time with an organism less than a millimetre across. A harder time seeing it, and a harder time keeping it out. I estimate that what’s left of Humanity 1.0 will close up shop within a month of one of these pods opening.”

“But… you said they won’t open,” Parks says, stricken.

“I said they won’t open by themselves. This species is a sport, a mutant form, and its development is haphazard. But sooner or later, the trigger event – whatever it is – will happen. It’s only a matter of time, with the probability rising gradually towards a hundred per cent.”

Parks doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that. He withdraws at last, and leaves her to it. And although she didn’t let his presence slow her down too much, she’s a lot happier to be alone.