“Also, without getting too deep into why we thought so, it seemed like maybe this virus could be the evolutionary ancestor of all viruses. Virus Zero. So Arthur came up with an idea. We used some powerful modeling software to ‘back out’ the virus and its computed effects from living organisms. We ran the infection process backward in the computer, so to speak, undoing the damage this thing did on our model organisms, all the way up to people, to homo sapiens.
“You know what we got in our no-virus model? Incredibly healthy people, physically, mentally, emotionally. They were strong, they didn’t get sick, they didn’t get cancer, they didn’t develop mental illness. They had long life spans, at the theoretical limit of telomere degradation and cell division. A thousand years or more. Like Methuselah in the Bible.
“So imagine Earth before this thing arrived. With no viruses and no degrading effect of this plague, it would be Eden. Everything more healthy, everything in better balance. Then this plague showed up sometime during the last ten thousand years, before recorded human history but after the Ice Age.
“Maybe it evolved here, but I just don’t see how. I think it’s extraterrestrial. If anything can survive a naked journey through space to another planet, a virus could. It could be the result of a life-bearing planet being destroyed, the debris scattered through interstellar space carrying it. Or it could be sent from some aliens that wish us harm. What better way to attack another world on the cheap? Biological warfare, like smallpox blankets and the Indians, or plague corpses catapulted over the castle walls.”
Zeke broke in, “Maybe we should keep that to ourselves. People will say we’ve been infected by alien viruses and are not human any longer…like we’re pod people or something.”
That stopped Elise for a moment. “Yeah, right. Shut up about aliens. So anyway we – mostly Roger - made an extremely sophisticated computer model of our Eden, with humans and animals living in balance, with those long lifespans, with telomeres that didn’t degrade…everything we had learned by the virtual-undoing model. Then we introduced the virtual plague to see what would happen. We ran the infection model forward again.”
Elise took a deep breath. “It spread like wildfire, infecting everything. Living things degraded, subtly but thoroughly. The higher order the organism, the more it degraded. It affected humans most of all, promoting animalistic behavior.
“The plague left most host cells intact, but with a bunch of mutations and other damage to every system in the body. It shortened lifespans, made everyone stupider and weaker, more selfish, more violent, less altruistic and social in their behavior. It also boosted the fertility of both male and female, so it accelerated population explosions, competition for territory. Humans and animals both began overeating, overkilling, gorging on prey, overgrazing land and trees. Killing for sport. Fighting for territory, fighting over mating rights. They stopped cooperating. Humans started tribal wars. Everything just went to hell, hell on Earth, compared to what went before.”
She rubbed her face with both of her hands. “So we called it the Devil Plague. This devil corrupted our virtual Eden.”
Daniel’s mind whirled with the implications. Maybe those old stories had a grain of truth in them. The Devil was supposed to have come from Heaven to Earth, corrupting the Garden of Eden. This was the panspermia scenario’s evil twin; instead of a life-bearing meteorite jump-starting life, it damaged what was already here. He said, “So you believe this is what happened in the real world? Like the model?”
“Actually, yes,” she said. “It makes sense. But by this time Dr. Durgan thought we had a biological weapon we could use. We couldn’t convince him that it wouldn’t work that way. He thought we were holding out on him, so he assigned us those…commissars. Minders. Slave drivers. We couldn’t take vacations, or visit our families. He thought we were acting like those German nuclear scientists under the Nazis, the ones that slowed down their atomic bomb program…but we weren’t! We would have resisted if it really was a bio-weapon. Ironically, we were being punished for a moral choice we never had to make.”
“So it can’t be weaponized?” asked Vinny.
Arthur spoke up. “No, the Devil Plague wouldn’t do much to anyone now. It has done all the damage it was going to do more than ten thousand years ago. There is a kind of limit. It will only put so much of a load on the physiological system, and then it just stops replicating itself and goes inert. In fact, it’s everywhere even now. You can find it in everything in a dormant state, in low concentrations. It only flares up occasionally, almost at random. And it’s actually fairly easy to generate resistance. In the real world, we demonstrated that every eukaryotic organism on Earth has enough residual immunity to make it just a nuisance disease. No worse than a cold. It was a dead end, except as a research subject.”
Elise picked up the thread smoothly. “Yes, it seems like humans got lucky. Developed a certain amount of immunity. So we started studying the Eden Plague. Of course we didn’t call it that then, but once we figured it out, the name was inevitable. But this one is certainly a designed organism, probably by humans. I’d guess the Soviets created it. They did a lot of research on biologicals, on phages. They have medical phage clinics even now, to treat superbug bacterial infections. Phages to kill bacteria.”
Daniel stuck his hand up like a kid in class. “How come you don’t think the Eden Plague is extraterrestrial too?”
She replied, “Because it looks like it was built directly from the Devil Plague. Genetically engineered with known techniques. You need the poison to design the antidote. That’s the only reason it was even possible, because they had isolated and purified the proto-DP to study it in its non-mutated state.
“So Durgan was hoping this was his bio-weapon, but it wasn’t. It seemed to us that the Eden Plague was specifically designed to reverse the Devil Plague process. To restore certain organisms – in this case humans – to their former state. And it almost works! With a few years and a billion dollars I’m pretty sure it could be perfected. We’ve come a long way in genetic engineering the past few decades since they made this.”
Elise sounded enthusiastic, but smart as she was, Daniel didn’t think she had thought it through as far as he had. He said, “Even in its current imperfect form, it seems like a cure for a lot of diseases. So what if the patient has to eat a lot of food. That’s a small price to pay for saving someone’s life. But if word gets out, and it’s in short supply, the whole world will be after it. It could plunge us into World War Three.”
“Oh.” A look of horror came over her face. “Do you really think so? But it would be free to everyone! Even now, it could be passed from person to person. It’s only contagious through bodily fluids...”
He went on, relentlessly. “But people in the government would want to control anything so valuable. Sell it, keep it for themselves or their own citizens first, or blackmail others with it…or finish developing it as a super-soldier serum. No matter how you slice it, it’s power. And word of it would wreck the medical establishment overnight. No need for doctors or hospitals or drug companies anymore, when perfect health is free. Millions thrown out of work, trillions of dollars of value lost, the stock markets crashing, economic depression.”
“But it will free up mankind to do so much more!”she cried.
“Not until after a lot of chaos. And how about overpopulation?” asked the team’s resident pessimist, Skull. “If everyone is healthy and no one dies…”
“Yes, that’s a problem,” Arthur interjected. “The perfected Eden Plague would probably lower fertility, but not the version we have now. Quite the opposite, in fact, because healthy men and women will likely have more children.”