Netcast: Zero (4 page)

Reply: Besides,
Arielle continued,
don’t you think someone at World Health has already considered and rejected that idea? If you’d started your pre-interview research more than fifteen minutes before your interview, you probably would have found the same report that I did. They rejected that idea months ago, only a few weeks after Klaria first showed up.

Hanna squinted.
Message: Are you sure?

Arielle’s expression remained unchanged. She was a master at controlling her composure even while in the midst of a mental messaging debate. It was a skill that Hanna had never mastered.
Reply: Yes, I’m sure. I did my research last night, like you should have.
Arielle’s eyes peered up from the e-mag she had been perusing during the entire exchange, her eyes locking briefly on Hanna’s, her left eyebrow slightly raised.

The door from the corridor opened, and Graham Barnett entered the lobby.

Hanna’s eyes shifted from Arielle toward Graham.
Message: Well, I guess that rules out my ‘just woke up’ theory.

Reply: Be nice.

Graham was wearing clothing very similar to what he had worn during the interview the day before, and he sported the same disheveled hair style. His vid-kit control panel was hanging on his back from a shoulder strap, and he was dragging the wheeled docking base behind him.

“Mister Barnett,” Arielle greeted, extending her hand as he approached. “It’s a pleasure to meet you in person.”

“Let’s hope you still feel that way after a few assignments,” he replied as he shook her hand. “Miss Bohl,” he said, reaching for her hand as well.

“Hanna,” she replied.

“Guess you two should call me Graham then.”

“I’m Arielle, but people call me Ari.”

“Great.”

“Do you need to get set up?”

“Nope. I’ve got eight orbs prepped and ready. I figure limited space in his office, so two POVs and double-long shot should be enough. If not, it’ll only take me a minute to spin up additional orbs and views.”

“Whatever you say,” Arielle agreed.

“Miss Bohl?” the receptionist called. “The doctor will see you now.”

Hanna, being the face of the team and the one that would be conducting the interview, was always the first to meet the interview subject, and thus, was the first to enter Doctor Benarro’s office.

The office was larger than expected, with several large padded chairs facing the doctor’s desk, as well as a sofa and two more sitting chairs to one side of the room. Like most offices, there was a large window behind him that looked out over one of the many greenbelts that had been incorporated into the city of Boston, just as they had in most of the major cities of Earth since the big migration that occurred centuries earlier after the core worlds had been opened up for colonization.

“Doctor Benarro,” Hanna greeted, a smile on her face and her hand extended politely. “It is such a great pleasure to meet you. I am such a fan of your research.”

“Really?” the elderly man replied, somewhat surprised.

“I’m Hanna Bohl,” she continued, shaking his hand. She turned to face Arielle. “This is my producer, Arielle Dugah, and our videographer, Graham Barnett.”

“We’re going to need to do something about that window,” Graham mumbled to Arielle. “Too much backlight.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Doctor Benarro,” Arielle greeted, also shaking the doctor’s hand.

“Likewise. I can turn it off… the window, I mean. It’s not real, it’s just a viewer.”

“That would be great,” Graham replied politely.

Arielle noticed that Graham was actually behaving quite well in front of the subject.

“A viewer?” Hanna wondered.

“Yes. We handle communicable diseases here in our research, so we’re not allowed to have real windows within the secondary quarantine zone. I can put anything you like on it.”

“Setting it to the same pattern as the wallpaper will be fine, Doctor,” Graham instructed, as he brought his control pad around so that it hung in front of him at his waist. He pressed a button, and eight small orbs popped up out of the top of his wheeled case, rising up into the air and spreading out, taking up positions around the office at geometrically precise points, above, even with, and below Doctor Benarro’s and Hanna’s lines of sight. He tied his own visual space into the vid-kit’s image output in order to see the final product of the full immersion recording he was about to create. He looked about the room, fading the immersion feed from the vid-kit’s image output in and out several times, comparing what he saw with his own eyes with what the full immersion recording processors were recreating for him. After a few adjustments, he was satisfied. “Wanna peek?” he asked Arielle as his mind commanded the view from the vid-kit to shrink to a small square in the upper right corner of his personal visual space.

“Why not?” Arielle replied, trying to appear somewhat disinterested. The truth was, neither she nor Hanna had ever had the opportunity to compare a full immersion shot to the real thing, and in real time.

An incoming FI feed alert flashed in Arielle’s visual space. She commanded the communication circuits in her neuro-digital implant to accept the incoming feed and the image faded into view, replacing what her eyes were seeing. “Whoa,” she said, more shocked by the quality than she had expected. “Other than a slight shift to the left, I don’t know that I could tell the difference.”

“Move half a meter to your left,” Graham instructed, “then take your image capacity down to about forty percent and turn right a touch to line up.”

Arielle followed Graham’s instructions moving left and turning her head until she could no longer distinguish between what her eyes were seeing and what the full immersion system was showing her. “I think I got it,” she announced. She began fading back and forth between the FI feed and her natural eyesight. “Wow,” she whispered.

Graham smiled. “Pretty freaky, huh?”

“Very,” Arielle agreed. She looked at Graham. “You’re pretty good with this stuff.”

“It’s all in how you arrange your balls, baby.”

“So, after the introduction, I thought we would start with you giving us a bit of background about the Klaria virus,” Hanna began, trying to distract the doctor from the exchange between her producer and their new videographer. “After that, I’ll start asking more detailed questions about the virus, how it’s spread, it’s mortality rate… the usual stuff. I imagine you’ve done this kind of thing dozens of times, right?”

“A few,” the doctor agreed.

“Okay, whenever you two are ready,” Hanna announced.

“Right,” Graham replied. “Just a second.”

Arielle stepped aside, moving back behind Graham so as to remain out of the shot as much as possible. The FI processing algorithms would remove her and Graham from the final images, as well as the orbs and any shadows they cast. The further away she was, the easier it would be for the system to fill in the space that she had occupied.

Three of the orbs left their positions and flew about the perimeter of the room, recording the images of all the walls and decor in order to provide the software with enough data to fill in what it needed later. Once the three orbs returned to their positions, Graham started recording. “We’re hot,” he announced. “Synch tones in three……two……one……”

Three tones sounded, with the last one lasting longer than the other two.

Hanna waited several seconds, her eyes fixed on the small orb floating just behind and left of Doctor Benarro’s head. “I’m Hanna Bohl, and I’m in the office of Doctor Gabriel Benarro, a leading epidemiologist, former chairman of the Global Disease Control Organization, and current head of the Boston Center for the study of communicable diseases. The good doctor has agreed to tell us something about the Klaria virus that has been appearing in various places around the world over the last year.” Hanna shifted her eyes from the camera to the doctor. “Doctor Benarro, thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.”

“It my pleasure, Miss Bohl,” Doctor Benarro replied.

“For those who might not have heard much about Klaria, please, give us a bit of background on the virus?”

“Of course,” the doctor began. “The virus first appeared more than thirteen months ago, in the village of Klaria. Since then, there have been at least three hundred outbreaks at varying locations around the world, resulting in more than twelve thousand deaths. In addition, there are at least fifty additional outbreaks, and eleven hundred deaths, in which the diagnosis of Klaria was unconfirmed.”

A list of questions, all provided by the client, appeared in Hanna’s personal visual space, fed to her by Arielle.

“What is it about the Klaria virus that is most troubling?” Hanna asked, selecting the first question in the order suggested.

“The biggest problems with the Klaria virus are its mortality rate, and the fact that we have been unable to understand how it is transmitted.”

“How high is the mortality rate?”

“About ninety percent, thus far, although that number could increase if the survivors of the unconfirmed cases are proven to not be the Klaria virus.”

“Originally, Klaria was thought to be blood borne, was it not?”

“Originally, yes. This was based on the fact that during the original outbreak, several people who were accidentally exposed to the blood of patients infected with the Klaria virus also became infected. However, later outbreaks disproved this assumption, as cases that had not been exposed to the blood of infected patients themselves still became infected. In that case, it was determined that the most likely cause was the droplets of moisture spread into the air when we cough. In other words, Klaria was then thought to be airborne.”

Hanna nodded. “I see, but that too turned out to be inaccurate?”

“Yes, it did,” Doctor Benarro confirmed. “To date, we have had solid evidence that the Klaria virus was transmitted by air, bodily fluids, and even by mosquitoes at one point. However, the transmission method is rarely the same. If fact, in a few of the outbreaks, they were unable to discover the mode of transmission. This led us to believe that Klaria was capable of surprisingly rapid mutation, more rapid than any pathogen ever encountered, even more so than the Trans-Hatari virus back in the twenty-second century.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor Benarro, but if the virus is mutating, then the differences would be obvious, wouldn’t they?”

“Correct. Normally, when a virus mutates, it leaves a sort of trail, a series of indicators that help us determine how the virus is likely to mutate in the future. Unfortunately, the Klaria virus mutations appear to occur randomly, sometimes even mutating back to one of its previous states.”

“Really?” Hanna seemed genuinely surprised.

Doctor Benarro pressed a button on the remote on his desk, causing the wallpaper pattern on the viewer behind him to fade away to black. “These images of the virus clearly demonstrate the mutation patterns…” Doctor Benarro stopped mid sentence as he glanced over his shoulder and noticed that the images had not appeared on the viewer. He pressed the remote again. A series of error messages appeared on the viewer. “I’m terribly sorry,” he apologized, becoming somewhat flustered. “The images were supposed to be…” He looked at Hanna, and then at Graham. “Maybe we should stop?”

From; Arielle: Keep going, we’ll fix it in post.

“That’s all right, Doctor,” Hanna assured him, “we can cut this part out in editing. Don’t worry.”

Doctor Benarro pressed a button on his desk, causing the view screen to go dark and his desktop display to come to life. Hovering over his desk was a pale blue, transparent display, with the same error messages flashing in and out of view. The doctor slid the messages out of the way with a swipe of his hand as he pulled a command console out of the left side of the display with his left hand. He rapidly touched transparent buttons floating in the air over his desk as he spoke. “This same thing happened last week,” he explained as he struggled to resolve the glitch. “IT said it was the Twister virus, but they promised they had cleared it from our systems. They even had to reboot all our systems from an earlier backup. We had to go back to an image from a month earlier before we found a clean one. Lost an entire month’s worth of work.”

The image of the world map, with all its red, green and yellow dots flashed into Hanna’s memory. She called the map up again in her personal visual space. The dot over Boston was yellow, and it was dated a week ago.

From Arielle: What are you doing, Hanna?

“Doctor Benarro, is it true that the majority of the outbreaks of the Klaria virus have coincided in both time and location with reported outbreaks of the Twister virus?”

“Excuse me?”

Graham looked at Hanna, then at Arielle.
Message; Arielle: What the hell is she talking about?

“The Twister virus, Doctor,” Hanna explained.

Reply: Don’t ask,
Arielle’s answer appeared in Graham’s visual space.
We’re not connected to any local systems, are we?

“Is it possible that the two viruses are somehow related?” Hanna continued.

Message: Of course not. My gear is self-contained,
Graham assured her.
Hell, I don’t even do direct uploads. I do everything by data cards. Reformatted after each connection with the net. Why do you ask?

“That would be quite impossible,” Doctor Benarro said, dismissing the thought with a wave of his hand.

Reply: Just checking,
Arielle messaged.
We didn’t get a chance to talk about procedures yet. The doc’s problems made me think of it.

“Why?” Hanna asked, continuing to press the idea. A message flashed in her visual space.
From Arielle: Don’t go there, Hanna.

“Well, for one, Klaria is a biological virus, and Twister is digital.” The tone in the doctor’s voice was becoming somewhat condescending.

“I understand that,” Hanna assured him, “however, one cannot help but notice that the majority of the outbreaks of both viruses have been simultaneous.”