Plague Year by Jeff Carlson Page A

safest and best-fed members of the human race.
    They had been informed that the situation in Colorado was stable, yet Ruth caught hints of a different truth in these conversations—unexplained delays, obvious shortages, names that seemed to have permanently disappeared. She’d tried to chitchat, digging for more, but was usually interrupted and once had been cut off entirely. Power conservation, they said. Other times, the scientists she spoke with deflected her questions or ignored her outright. Why?
    If she’d known any of them, if she had any friends there, she might have pressed. But their relationships were as narrow as the thin umbilical connecting her headset to the radio.
    * * * *
    James said, “I have good news and I have good news.”
    “Well I always say hear the good news first.” Ruth tried to make her smile show in her voice. Too many of these contacts were litanies of despair.
    She had actually met James Hollister at a convention in Philadelphia, years ago, and had a vague image of thick glasses and a great Moby Dick of a desk-belly. Her memory of his published work was stronger. He’d led a new approach in nanobiotic medicine, using synthesized amino acids to pierce bacterial membranes and thereby kill infections. That was a field related to the current problem only in the loosest sense, but James was no dummy and had brought a unique perspective to their efforts to build an anti-nano nano. ANN.
    He’d volunteered for this coordinating position to free up others with more appropriate skill sets, and Ruth was glad. She talked to him six times out of ten and no one else made jokes anymore, not even sorry little puns like good news , good news .
    “We’ve redesigned our engine,” he said, “pushing burn efficiency up almost 5 percent.”
    “Great.” Chemical science was his specialty, after all. “I suppose that’s great, James, but what does it matter? We can just enlarge the ANN if we need more capacity.”
    Silence. Static.
    She almost didn’t say it. “You’re wasting time, getting fancy. We have a functional rep algorithm. We can go as big as we want—5 percent, 10, it doesn’t matter. I thought we agreed to focus on discrimination.”
    “Ruth, we needed something we could point to, something real. LaSalle’s bug tested solid and the president’s council is talking about reassigning everyone to him.”
    “What! Did he run real-world or in lab conditions?”
    “Lab, if it matters.”
    “Of course it matters! We test out in controlled conditions, too. What did you tell them?”
    “I told them our burn efficiency was up 5 percent.”
    This time it was Ruth who didn’t answer immediately. Then she laughed. “Okay, I guess that is good news.”
    There had never been a consensus on how to deal with the situation. Everyone wanted to destroy the locust, of course, but at present there were no less than three competing proposals— and twice that many concepts had been discarded in the past months. A shortage of equipment meant much of their work was theoretical anyway, and nanotech developers in any field tended to be both visionaries and a bit wiggy about their favorite ideas. The end of the world hadn’t changed that.
    The end of everything had probably made it worse. Too much was at stake, and the name of the person who defeated the machine plague might become greater than Muhammad or Christ.
    “LaSalle’s an idiot,” Ruth said, and her earpiece rattled with two thumps, maybe James shrugging.
    Or maybe it was whoever else was listening.
    She didn’t care. She said, “I guess he’s still shouting from the rooftops that discrimination is a waste of time?”
    “He’s got half the council agreeing with him.”
    “James, there’s no way it can work otherwise. He can’t ignore the issue just because it’s inconvenient.”
    Any real-world nano had to overcome three major hurdles, and integrating each solution into a functioning whole was in a sense the fourth and most difficult