Brin, David - The Giving Plague

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The Giving Plague

David Brin, 1987

You think you're going to get me, don't you? Well, you've got another think coming,

'cause I'm ready for you.

That's why there's a forged a card in my wallet saying my blood group is AB negative,

and a MedicAlert tag warning that I'm allergic to penicillin, aspirin, and phenylalanine.

Another one states that I'm a practicing, devout Christian Scientist. All these tricks ought to

slow you down when the time comes, as it's sure to, sometime soon.

Even if it makes the difference between living and dying, there's just no way I'll let

anyone stick a transfusion needle into my arm. Never. Not with the blood supply in the state

it's in.

And anyway, I've got antibodies. So you just stay the hell away from me, ALAS. I won't

be your patsy. I won't be your vector.

I know your weaknesses, you see. You're a fragile, if subtle devil. Unlike TARP, you can't

bear exposure to air or heat or cold or acid or alkali. Blood to blood, that's your only route.

And what need had you of any other? You thought you'd evolved the perfect technique,

didn't you?

What was it Leslie Adgeson called you? The perfect master? The paragon of viruses?

I remember long ago when HIV, the AIDS virus, had everyone so awed with its subtlety

of lethal design. But compared with you, HIV is just a crude butcher. A maniac with a

chainsaw, a blunderer that kills its hosts and relies for transmission on habits humans can,

with effort, get under control. Oh, old HIV had its tricks, but compared with you? An

amateur!

Rhinoviruses and flu are clever, too. They're profligate, and they mutate rapidly. Long ago

they learned how to make their hosts drip and wheeze and sneeze, so the victims spread the

misery in all directions. Flu viruses are also a lot smarter than AIDS 'cause they don't

generally kill their hosts, just make 'em miserable while they hack and spray and inflict fresh

infections on their neighbors.

Oh, Les Adgeson was always accusing me of anthropomorphizing our subjects. Whenever

he came into my part of the lab, and found me cursing some damned intransigent

leucophage in rich, Tex-Mex invective, he'd react predictably. I can just picture him now,

raising one eyebrow, commenting dryly in his Winchester accent.

"The virus cannot hear you, Forry. It isn't sentient, nor even alive, strictly speaking. It's

only a packet of genes in a protein case, after all."

"Yeah, Les," I'd answer. "But selfish genes! Given half a chance, they'll take over a

human cell, force it to make armies of new viruses, then burst it apart as they escape to

attack others. They may not think. All that behavior may have evolved by blind chance. But

doesn't it all feel as if it's planned? As if the nasty little things were guided, somehow, by

somebody out to make us miserable ... ? Out to make us die?"

"Oh, come now Forry." He would smile at my New World ingenuousness. "You wouldn't be

in this field if you didn't find phages beautiful, in their own way."

Good old smug, sanctimonious Les. He never did figure out that viruses fascinated me for

quite another reason. In their rapacious insatiability I saw a simple, distilled purity of

ambition that exceeded even my own. The fact that it was mindless did little to ease my

qualms. I've always imagined we humans over-rated brains, anyway.

We'd first met when Les visited Austin on sabbatical, some years before. He'd had the

Boy Genius rep even then, and naturally I played up to him. He invited me to join him back

in Oxford, so there I was, having regular amiable arguments over the meaning of disease

while the English rain dripped desultorily on the rhododendrons outside.

Les Adgeson. Him with his artsy friends and his pretensions at philosophy -- Les was all

the time talking about the elegance and beauty of our nasty little subjects. But he didn't fool

me. I knew he was just as crazy Nobel-mad as the rest of us. Just as obsessed with the

chase, searching for that piece of the Life Puzzle, that bit leading to more grants, more lab

space, more techs, more prestige ... to money, status and, maybe eventually, Stockholm.

He claimed not to be interested in such things. But he was a smoothie, all right. How else,

in the midst of the Thatcher massacre of British science, did his lab keep expanding? And

yet, he kept up the pretense.

Viruses have their good side," Les kept saying. "Sure, they often kill, in the beginning. All

new pathogens start that way. But eventually, one of two things happens. Either humanity

evolves defenses to eliminate the threat or ... "

Oh, he loved those dramatic pauses.

"Or?" I'd prompt him, as required.

"Or else we come to an accommodation, a compromise ... even an alliance."

That's what Les always talked about. Symbiosis. He loved to quote Margulis and Thomas,

and even Lovelock, for pity's sake! His respect even for vicious, sneaky brutes like HIV was

downright scary.

"See how it actually incorporates itself right into the DNA of its victims?" he would muse.

"Then it waits, until the victim is later attacked by some other disease pathogen. The host T

cells prepare to replicate, to drive off the invader, only now some chemical machinery is

taken over by the new DNA, and instead of two new T cells, a plethora of new AIDS viruses

results."

"So?" I answered. "Except that it's a retrovirus, that's the way nearly all viruses work."

"Yes, but think ahead, Forry. Imagine what's going to happen when, inevitably, the AIDS

virus infects someone whose genetic makeup makes him invulnerable!"

"What, you mean his antibody reactions are fast enough to stop it? Or his T cells repel

invasion?"

Oh, Les used to sound so damn patronizing when he got excited.

"No, no, think!" he urged. "I mean invulnerable after infection. After the viral genes have

incorporated into his chromosomes. Only in this individual certain other genes prevent the

new DNA from triggering viral synthesis. No new viruses are made. No cellular disruption.

The person is invulnerable. But now he has all this new DNA ... "

"In just a few cells -- "

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