"Brilliant," said Dr. E.J. Castaman in the meeting room adjacent to his office. He glanced over the heads of the three scientists at the table after turning his laptop around for them to see the newest charts and graphs. "So much promise. A way to defeat viral and bacterial infections once and for all." The three scientists stared into each other's eyes, nodding to each other in agreement.
Dr. Castaman paused for a moment to decide if he should wait for the others to agree with him silently, or continue on, and received no indication to wait, so he picked up where he'd left off. "It's a virtual checklist. Each and every treatment is itemized to ensure that each one meets stringent criteria to remain viable, so that discontinued treatments will not lead to a resistant strain of disease."
He turned the laptop around, just a little, so that it was tilted toward the three other scientists. Six images of infectious nanobacteria cycled through in a continuous loop. "See - there's the smallpox virus, the polio virus, the Hanta virus, the New World Env - " he froze, mid-sentence.
He slowly rotated the screen toward him again, fixating on the New World Environmental nanobacteria. They had formed a vortex in their medium, an eddy of some kind. He played back the image just a few frames, and froze the image in a slowed-down version. He zoomed in on the swirling vortex of the New World's DNA, which was encoding that of a different, yet-unidentified bacteria.
Castaman looked up at the other two scientists. ''They're from different DNA sequences, but they all have the same cytoplasmic pattern," he said. "You'll notice there's no outer layer for the cytoplasmic filaments - it's all internal."
"And there's no membrane visible," said one scientist, "and every single inner filaments have the nucleosomes intact. Every one."
The other scientist nodded. "And intact mitochondrial structure, still - but without the outer membrane."
"It's what we've been hoping for," said Castaman, "but we weren't sure if it existed."
"And it's here," said one, "Unlike the innate immune response, which is lagging right behind the rest of the body."
"Yes," said Castaman, "the systems aren't all cybernetically linked yet, which we knew from the onset would happen. But it's developing right before our eyes."
"Do we tell the others?" said one, obviously referring to the council.
"Not yet," said Castaman, "I want to study this for a few days before I make that decision."
Castaman paused for a moment. "I wonder what it means."
"What?" said the scientist.
"This formation here," Castaman said, zooming in on the cytosol, which now had a discernable formation. "The New World's DNA is multiplying. Foaming. But the symbol there. What does it mean? Is it some kind of information exchange? I wonder if anything like this has ever been seen. Maybe we should take a sample."
One scientist left for the lab, and the other two started to doodle on a pad.
"What did you memorize about the nanobacteria?" asked Castaman.
"Smallpox, polio, Hanta, and New World," said one.
"Right," said Castaman, "we must have gotten the same sequence for the hantavirus."
"So it's probably not an error, then..."
"No," said Castaman, "it's not an error. It's something we don't understand. We'll figure it out quickly, now. We're getting close."
"We're had to inform the council," said Castaman, "we've had a breach of containment, and the news is spreading." Castaman gestured towards the small plague of nanomites floating near the window of the meeting room, sniffing the air with their long tails, raising their caps and small whiskers. "It was all over the news by the time I managed to get back to my office."
"Is that why the labs are isolated?" said one of the council members, the one who was not a scientist.
"Yes," said another council member, "everything has been sealed. They're outside the room, and we will not see them until they are ready to go back to work."
"How long will that take?" said the scientist.
"I don't know," said Castaman, "they had to set up the protocols, and no more than a couple of minutes were spent outside the room. We didn't know how active they might be until we saw them."
"So the council will never know."
"No," said one scientist, "the scientists still on-site won't know."
"And you're sure you can isolate them from the mainframe?" said another.
"Yes," said the first scientist, "we're sure that wouldn't be a problem."
"So where are we?" said one of the other council members.
"We're waiting until the next time they go into the room," said Castaman. "We're going to live-stream to the hard drive of Dr. J. Hart's computer. Everything is automated by then, and the nanomites will have no choice but to be recording what we want them to record."
The scientists all nodded to each other.
