Prologue
May 15, 1993
I’m a Biochemist. My name is Robin Chantey. On this paper is my confession, and I hope my defense, should I stand before a jury.
When I was a little boy, my father told me a story that still keeps me up at night. There once existed a tiny village between Telegraph Cove and Alert Bay that is no longer on a modern Canadian map. It was wiped out when the battle with the 1918 pandemic was lost. In my nightmare, the only survivor who escaped before the village was made to disappear is a starving infant bearing my own face. That tragic story fueled my passionate dive into viral infections and its ferocious tentacle on men.
Viruses are vile creatures. They lie dormant, seemingly harmless when they gain entry into a host. But like the aliens from the ‘War of the World’, they eventually take over and slowly suck the life out. They are vile alright, reason why they are feared. So I studied them and structured a way to overcome them. But as my knowledge of them broadened, I opened a window into the souls of their human hosts. Do the people who wage such fierce war against the two-faced aliens not see their own reflections in them, or they choose to play dumb?
If I had known what I am creating will make humans come out of their dormant shells and reveal their true monstrous nature, I’d have let them be conquered. If only I can turn back the clock…
His hand trembled; the grease in his palm made it difficult to get a firmer grip on the pen and so it danced on the sheet like a roach on a hot plate. Tears and sweat slid down the tip of his nose and fell in splattered drops, making dark-blue inky blots on the white sheet. His last words to the world before he is branded a fugitive – a villain – were running together like a child’s artwork. He tried to suppress the quiver in his hand, wiping his nose with the palm of the other.
The footsteps that made him pause were drawing closer to the lab. They were coming for him. When they do, they would put him in a high walled facility with electrified wire fencing and unbreakable gates. He couldn’t imagine surviving there but if he did, they would put a rope around his neck on a scheduled day the great District of Columbia decide would be his death day and watch him strangle to death. While his execution take place, WTTG would showcase his life story, how intelligent and promising he was and the world would wonder what changed him; CNN would discuss at length how immigrants work to the detriment of their host nations; BBC would label him a terrorist. What he did was gruesome, he had not thought of himself capable of it, but if they realised he had no choice… that he did it for the sake of humanity… would they empathise? He dropped the pen on the paper. No, his motive wouldn’t matter; his side of the story would be irrelevant. He had no defence. He was going to hang for it, well, so be it. In any case, his death wouldn’t give them what they want either. Abalone had probably found Professor Warden already. He braced himself to face the outcome.
A hot, orange ball blew through the door and whooshed past him. That was unexpected, not necessarily in an unpleasant way. It wouldn’t rewrite his story but at least, he wouldn’t go through the humiliation of dangling at the end of a rope. He closed his eyes and embraced the warmth cooking his flesh, his lungs, his eyeballs – a short suffering that would pave the transition he sought. The curtains were closing on him; he could almost hear them hustling softly behind the angry hissing and crackling. But the show wasn’t over…
