6. 6 #3
With the information present, the only scenario I could imagine was that he tried to escape initially, leaving the pool of blood by the elevator. He couldn’t, so he ran to Elias’s office, where he received his fatal wound. He had to have information.
I pulled on the hand shoved in his pocket. His body was still warm. It must have killed Elias to move him, knowing he was only minutes late to save him.
His hand was free from his pocket, and as his fingers loosened from the fist they were forced into, a thumb drive was exposed.
Taking the thumb drive from the man, I plugged it into Elias’s computer.
Thankful he left it logged in, I opened the drive to find a single file named, “FIDE NEMINI.” Double clicking the file, I was greeted with 10 pages of black bars of various sizes, like the document had been redacted.
They couldn’t be words, as I didn’t find any bars small enough to be the word “a,” “of,” or “the,” which are pretty much necessary in any document.
I scrolled. Quickly, slowly, forward, and backwards, looking for any way to understand what I was looking at.
I felt like I was back in the lab, months ago, when I first began my vaccine research.
In order to eradicate it, I first had to have an understanding of how it attached itself to its host, how it replicated, and how easily it mutated.
In clean host cells, the virus was consistent in its replication.
After the majority of the cells had been infiltrated, which was a quick process compared to other viruses I had studied previously, it was like a switch flipped, and all at once, the virus mutated.
Of course, I didn’t know what effect this would have on a person, as I had only studied it in tubes.
Dr. Fassi was a clear example of this. He was in perfect health while the virus replicated, with no immune response to the foreign bodies.
They took over his body in stealth until they outnumbered his healthy cells, then the switch flipped, the infection manifested completely.
What I didn’t know was how he encountered the virus, or how long he had been infected before he turned into. . . what he turned into.
I worried now that Elias might have been right about the water. I never drank it at the lab, but I did drink and cook with the tap water at my own home. I hoped that despite being on Baker and Pryor property, that my water at home was safe. For the time being, I was still alive.
Studying the black bars, reminiscing about my earlier work, I could see the pattern on the page more clearly than before. It was a replication of the variation I had spent so much trying to create a vaccine for.
None of this was random. Instead, I stumbled upon a cipher that only two people could decode, and one of them was already dead. Though, a third person must exist out there, to have created this. I would worry about that later.
If I was asked to explain how I managed to decode the message, I don’t think I would have been able to describe my process. I knew this virus, inside and out, and I was staring at a rudimentary copy of its sequence.
Digging around the office, I found a legal pad and a pen and was able to begin using the cipher.
Variant 13, is what I was told. I could see the phases laid out, and I began to assign A, C, G, and T to where they would belong if I was looking at the actual virus.
I began by shifting the letter values by 13.
If it appeared to be phase 2, I shifted the letter by an additional 2 places, quickly turning the black bars into something legible.
After discovering the word “UNIT,” I knew then numbers were involved. Unit 12 was definitely noted in this file, so I added 0 through 9 between Z and A, and began again, knowing that I was on the right track.
The sound of a gun shot caught my attention, and I raised my own, sitting in Elias’s computer chair, my aim on the door. I told myself that if I heard another, or if Elias called for me, that I would run out to help him. I sat there, frozen, waiting for the call to run into action.
It didn’t come.
Instead, Elias appeared in the doorway, and I quickly dropped my gun, breathing out forcefully.
“Thank God,” I said, wiping the sweat off my forehead.
“One of them was left behind. Infected,” he said, his voice cold and detached.
“Are you okay?” I asked, reaching out to him. He didn’t close the distance.
“No.” He kneeled down, hand resting on the dead man’s back and he sighed, dealing with the moment in his own way. I couldn’t blame him. He cared for these people.
“What was his name?” I asked, my voice gentle.
“Michael.”
“I think Michael was trying to help you,” I said.
He raised his head to look at me. “How?”
I explained my theory of him trying to leave first, before realizing that he wasn’t going to be able to escape, and that he came here instead. Elias listened as I told him about the thumb drive, about the message hidden in the virus’s structure, and that I was almost done decoding it.
He let go of his grief for the time being, and sat on the side of his desk, gun at the ready, until I was done.