Reduction

I woke up early that morning, before the alarm. It was warm in the apartment, and my stomach was bothering me. Both were unusual, but I chalked them up to stress at work. I had to: the temperature was 68° Fahrenheit, my ideal room temperature, and I only ate superprocessed foods—my health was too important to me to trust the random mish-mash of molecules people romantically called “organic foods”. So it had to be stress.

And there was plenty of stress to go around at the Oberon Group, the technology and policy consultancy I had spent the last seven years of my life working for. My team had a dozen consulting contracts for the government that were closing, another half-a-dozen for private companies that had interim reports overdue, and nearly twenty active projects where the deadline for the interim reports was swiftly approaching. We had recently lost Randy Todd, who had been, without a doubt, one of the best vice-presidents—next to myself—at Oberon. When Randy left for Blackball—one of Oberon’s largest business partners, rather than a competitor—his project leaders, and his projects, all got assigned to me. And it was something less than an ideal fit.

There were also some renewed rumblings of a financial audit, perhaps going back as far as a decade. The idea of that was extremely worrisome, for a lot of reasons.

So, there was plenty of stress in my life, which had to explain it. The chances of me being physically ill were vanishingly small—as an urban American who was actively employed, insured, and regularly screened, the chances of me having any sort of illness or infection were approximately 147,000 to 1. My last screen had been on Friday—it was Oberon company policy that employees did not enter or exit without a simple screening—and I had been free from either known infection or indications of a new virus. And the chances of me being infected with a new virus were smaller still—almost 800,000 to 1–because even though I worked on any number of consultancy contracts to advise corporations and government agencies on managing infection, sabotage, shrink and direct attack, I stayed out of the field. And I constantly screened. As I said, my health was too important to me.

“I’m getting up,” I said loudly, and the lights came on.

“Good morning, Scott,” came Tana’s voice. I called it Tana, after the name of the apartment building: Tanzania Terrace. “Your 6:00 AM Alarm is deactivated. It is 5:07 AM, Monday, October the 3^rd, 2067. The outside temperature is 59° Fahrenheit. It will be partly cloudy today. The high today will be 68°. You are alone this morning. In the news—“

“Thanks, that’s enough,” I said. It would go on for half-an-hour, if I let it. It knew I was alone this morning and which one of us was there, that was what was important. Sometimes it would get confused, which wasn’t supposed to happen, and would run the start-up sequence for both me and my wife, when only one of us was home, or run her sequence for me, or mine for her, if either of us were in the apartment alone. I had put in several requests for maintenance to look at it, but the tech department at the Tanzania Terrace insisted nothing was wrong. I could probably have gotten to the bottom of it myself, if I had been truly motivated. But I worked all day and often into the night, and by the time I got home I just wanted to rest.

Alaka was gone—she had left early Saturday morning to scout locations in Toronto for a series of commercials she was working on, leaving me alone again. There was a little stress there, as well. Over the past year or two, Alaka had grown more distant, and had started working more and later hours. She had only been home on three days that week, and had been too busy even then for us to manage dinner together, much less go out to a movie or go shopping. We were both so busy, there was no time any more for us to do things as a couple. I had to admit, that bothered me as much as anything.

She had been unusually frisky—and obliging— the previous Friday evening, which had surprised me, but I was grateful. The sex had been kinky and, at points, almost acrobatic. I could only guess she had felt guilty, that we were spending so little time together, and had been trying to make up for it. Even so, the next morning she had been gone, earlier than she had said and had not bothered to wake me up to say goodbye. She had just left me an audiomemo not to forget to call about our reservations in Tuscany next month. “I love you, Scott,” the note had ended. “Kiss-kiss-kiss!” Why didn’t she talk to me like that in person, I wondered?

But Alaka was very beautiful, and—on those rare occasions when amorous—an incredible lover. I had a good job and lived in a nice apartment and we both had busy, interesting lives—I really didn’t need to be ungrateful, I told myself. It could be a lot worse.

Only after I went to the bathroom and ran the medscreen, did I begin to suspect that it already was. “Error,” Tana said. “Please stand on platform with both feet together. Do not bend or slouch.”

“I am,” I said. “I’m standing correctly—“

An alarm sounded. “Medical alert, medical alert—“ Tana started. “Contacting Dr. Ponnuru. Notifying FVC—“

“Cancel,” I said quickly. I was fortunate that my line of work allowed such a delay. Most citizens would have no choice but to have a blanket notification of any errors in screening go out to their general physician and the local bureau of the FVC. I reached out and pressed the side of the mirror screen—my privacy switch was invisible, but I knew where it was. One of my early projects at Oberon had been to lobby against allowing privacy switches on home or corporate medscreen equipment. Eventually, the arguments of the ACLU and Citizens for Humane Biology, among others, won out. They had argued that it could violate the privacy of those undergoing the hormone swings of transgendering, those taking suppressive drugs for a variety of addictions, those taking antidepressants and antipsychotics, and those engaging in home anti-aging or cosmetic therapies, among others. In practice, the most common use was probably what I was using it for; there was a potentially real, legitimate issue that my physician and the FVC should have been notified about, and I didn’t want them to know. At least, not yet.

I wasn’t transgendering and I wasn’t engaged in home cosmetic therapies or taking isotetetraloids to improve physical performance or taking mnemonphins to boost my mental prowess. I hadn’t been overseas in two months, and I hadn’t been rural for more than a month. I had had two dozen screens since then, and four full workups. The only real possibility that I could imagine, the only thing that could set off my medscreen, was a virus. Somehow, I had gotten infected.

“Identify nature of medical alert,” I said, as my reflection dissolved from the mirror, replaced by my latest biometric scan.

“Improbable inconsistency in core metrics,” Tana replied. “Your height as of Friday was 179.832 centimeters. Your height as of this morning is 171.45 centimeters. This is in excess of allowable variation. Your weight on Friday was 84.36 kilograms. Your weight as of this morning is 82.34 kilograms. Your body temperature is 100.04 degrees Fahrenheit, indicating an irregularity in your body metabolism. Your standing heartbeat is 89 beats per minute. Your normal heart rate is 57 beats per minute. Federal law requires that you notify the FVC and seek the counsel of your physician.”

“Scan for infection,” I said. There was a pause as the small platform I was standing on hummed, and the biometric display in front of me indicated the scan’s progress. The external scan probably couldn’t tell me anything, I knew, but the medscreen would be activating my internal nanomeds and polling them for information about general irregularities or recognizable viral signatures. If I was infected, I knew, the infection scan would tell me with what. Then I would have no choice—I would have to let it contact Dr. Ponnuru and notify the FVC. I just wanted to know what I was dealing with first, I told myself.

“Irregularities detected,” Tana said finally. “No recognizable signatures. You have a 73% chance of having been infected.”

“Mineral scan?”

“Levels of trace elements are all within expected ratios,” Tana replied.

I was thankful for small favors. If I was infected, it was a protein-based virus. These were the most common, were mostly the product of hackers and disgruntled college students giving inadequate consideration to the jail time that faced them when they were caught, and tended not to be fatal. Although the likelihood of my being infected with a protein virus not in my medscreen’s database seemed exceedingly small. How would I have gotten it? Viruses that wove themselves out of iron and zinc or carbon could lay dormant for years or travel rapidly across great distances or even target individual people or locations. Protein based viruses were not nearly so rugged, and generally wouldn’t survive long out of a living host.

I wasn’t sure how long it had been since I had updated my medscreen’s internal database, but decided not to download the most current dictionary of virus definitions, as that would also send a notification out to the FVC. They would know, soon, I just wanted to make sure.

I sighed. I was also going to have to take a personal day from work. It wouldn’t be difficult—I had nearly a hundred Federally-mandated mental health days available to me. But, given that Oberon had, in one form or another, lobbied against mandated mental health days for employees, taking any was frowned upon. But it would allow me to take the necessary time to visit my doctor, without indicating that I might be sick. When an employee called in sick, Oberon automatically notified the FVC of the absence, even though we weren’t required to by law. It was just considered a “good community health” policy, according to the Oberon Group policy manual—and, of course, it discouraged employees from taking any sick days as time off.

“Tana,” I said. “Please make an appointment for me with Dr. Ponnuru.”

“Yes, sir. What reason do you wish to list for the appointment?”

“Um. To discuss potential vitamin therapies.” Alaka had been taking them for several months, and had been trying to encourage me to try them, as well. I had no intention of paying good money for such snake-oil placebos, but it seemed like a good excuse for making an appointment—as a physician, Dr. Ponnuru would have to notify the FVC, if I had made an appointment for a potential illness or injury.

“Yes, sir. I have scheduled an appointment for 10:45 AM with Dr. Ponnuru’s scheduling service. You will be called if there is any change.”

“Thank you, Tana,” and stepped off the platform. In addition to feeling warm, and not inconsiderable stomach discomfort, I felt unusually tired. I went in the living room and sat down, and then had Tana call Oberon, to tell them I was taking a mental health day. I turned on the news, but didn’t watch it. Mostly, I watched the clock, biding the time until I could leave for my appointment.

I had a feeling I was not going to like hearing what Dr. Ponnuru would have to say.

◊◊◊

Dr. Ponnuru bounced on his heels as I entered. “Scott! So, you finally come to try the vitamin injections. They make a difference. I can tell you, I am a doctor, and I know you are quite the cynic, but—”

“Raja,” I said. “I didn’t—it’s not about the vitamins. I think I’ve got something. A virus. I didn’t want to register the appointment as a sickness—”

Dr. Ponnuru nodded wisely. “I understand. Let me get my assistant.”

He paused and returned with a black bag, and then took out his diagnostic MDA, and the scanning wand. “This is for myself,” he said. “Just preliminary. It is not—let us say, it doesn’t actively share the data on the network.”

I nodded. “Thank you, Raja. I just—before I report anything, I just want to know. I want to know what I have.”

“What is your suspicion?” he asked. “Your heart beat is up. Your blood pressure is up—“

“I don’t know. I think it’s protein based. My medscan didn’t find any increase of mineral traces. I’ve lost three pounds and eight centimeters since the scan on Friday—“

“Mmm,” he nodded. “It sounds to me as you may have contracted the Mbig-11 virus. While I have read about it—it is almost epidemic in Old Mexico now—I have heard of no cases this far north.”

“Mbig?” I asked. “But people were—that’s supposed to add to mass and density—“

“And Mbig does,” he said. “Mbig-11 is a recent variant—the same basic protein structure, with minor variations, but the same protein hooks and transports used to extract substance from the environment and then insert it inside the patient’s bone and muscle tissue is reversed, so that it extracts from the patient and then excretes.”

I blinked. Mbig-11? Nearly epidemic in Old Mexico? How had I missed that? If there was an epidemic of a synthesized protein virus anywhere, surely Oberon would be getting together a proposal or already floating a contract for consultancy with the Mexican government.

“I’m surprised such a thing would have gotten through the corporate Firewall at Oberon,” he was saying. “Unless you weren’t being screened—“

“We’re screened in and out. Though, if the signature wasn’t in the medscreen dictionary, it could miss it.”

He shook his head thoughtfully. “But certainly, it wouldn’t have missed your change in mass and proportion.”

“No,” I said slowly. He was right. I was trying to think of an alternative, but I couldn’t come up with one. There was almost no way I had been infected before I left work Friday. Between leaving work Friday evening, and getting up this Monday morning, I had contracted the Mbig-11 virus.

“Here,” Dr. Ponnuru said, holding the screen of his MDA in front of my face. The wand was placed against my shin, where I knew millions of nanomeds were painlessly sliding between skin cells and muscle cells and into my bloodstream. They would collect information from the entire area, both new and from my own permanent nanomeds, which could provide Dr. Ponnuru’s MDA with limited, but still valuable, personal health information from the previous weeks and months. Then the MDA would filter the torrent of information down to just what he wanted to see, or to show me, at that moment.

He bounced once on his heels. “This is your shinbone,” Dr. Ponnuru said. “Magnified approximately 1000 times. As you see, it is shrinking, right before our very eyes. Though the individual nanomechs are still too tiny to discern in this image, no doubt you see the thin threads coming away at these points, as a I move to the edge of the bone—there, and there. And that one. I cannot say for sure, but if it is consistent with the Mbig virus, those would be protein ‘conveyor belts’—moving the matter that is being extracted from your bones, marrow, and elsewhere, to transporters.” I must admit, I was a little irritated as he nodded approvingly. “Impressive work, for college boys with nothing but decade-old protein assemblers to work with. You would think with such talent, they could find something productive to do with their time!”

“That would be nice,” I said.

“Of course, you might not have quite so lucrative a career, if your consultation on such issues wasn’t so frequently needed. How has your stomach been feeling?”

I was caught off-guard by the sudden change of topic, though I suppose I should not have been; Dr. Ponnuru did such things frequently. “Well, I’ve been—well, I’ve had cramps. And indigestion, I think. I’m really not sure, it’s been so long—”

“Have you had diarrhea?” he asked. “That is a condition where the stool is very loose, almost liquid.”

I found myself blushing unaccountably. “Yes. It’s extremely uncomfortable. I haven’t had it since I was a child, but, yes, a few times today.“

“Has there been any discoloration to your stool or urine?”

“Some,” I said. “My urine has been darker. Cloudy.”

He nodded. “The virus is using your digestive system to expel the waste from the disassembly process. The original Mbig would collect matter from both undigested waste, but also clothing and surfaces that came into extended contact with the host. This variant may also expel via your skin—respiration through sweat glands, or direct transport of detritus outside of the body, via transporters that physically exit—”

“I don’t know if I like my bones being referred to as detritus,” I said. I felt sick. I was, literally, nauseous, but I just felt emotionally sick besides. What a mess. What was I going to do? A vice-president sloppy enough to get infected with a nanovirus wasn’t going to stay a vice-president for long; I knew that.

And who would benefit most, if I weren’t a vice-president any longer? I wondered about that. One of my team-leaders, without a doubt. There would be no knowing who they would promote to the position until it happened, but one of them might have the inside track. It was hard to conceive of, though; all my people were solid gold. I just couldn’t imagine them setting me up. Well, there was the group of project heads that were put under me when Randy left for Blackball; I found it entirely believable that any of them would want to nail my ass to the wall. This would be a highly illegal and unethical way to do it, and the end to any kind of career, even when they got out of jail, if caught—but there were at least two women and three men I wouldn’t have put it past.

I hoped it was just an accident, that the infection was incidental, a freak occurrence, but I had a difficult time convincing myself that was the case. If it wasn’t the case, and it was an intentional attack against me, I could only assume it wouldn’t be the last.

“All right—the expulsion of biomatter, then, let us call it. But it isn’t just your bones, Scott—everything is being reduced, from muscle tissue to skin and hair. It is really quite remarkable, especially for a pure protein virus—look how it removes bone material, layer by layer—these thin structures are like scaffolding—“ he said, pointing to what looked like an amorphous smudge on the bioscan. ”—that allow for the removal of material, before the scaffolding collapses, and then ‘stitches’ the remaining bone back together, then reinitiates the process again a few nanometers down. At the same time, you see there is a reduction in circumference, so you will be ‘shrinking’, as it were, across each axis.” He exhaled gravely. “It may have a built in shut-off, at which point it will stop the reductive process, but there is no guarantee. As the process progresses, even though there is no trauma or scarring, all natural biological processes will begin to suffer—“

“Or stop,” I murmured. No matter how sophisticated the nanovirus, eventually the unnatural reduction in the size of already small glands, capillaries, nerve endings and so on would keep them from functioning, no matter how effectively they were stitched back together. If the virus was smart enough to leave already small but critical systems unreduced in order to prevent malfunction as it continued to reduce the larger tissues and organs around them, other problems would result as the size differentials grew.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to see if we can requisition a response vaccine. I will have to give you a full exam and have it submitted to the FVC before I can make the request. But every moment delayed brings you a moment closer to potentially fatal complications—”

I felt like crying. What a mess. But, I had no choice.

“Go ahead,” I said.

He nodded. “Please come over to the medscreen table, and recline, with your head and feet matching the positions indicated—“

I did as he said. It was not shaping up to be a good day.

◊◊◊

Back at my apartment, I waited for word from Dr. Ponnuru that my vaccine had been approved. I also awaited an inquiry from the FVC and probably from internal security at Oberon, as well. I wanted to call Alaka, but I knew she was busy, and the commercials she was working on were important to her.

 Besides, she would find out soon enough. As Dr. Ponnuru had pointed out before I left his office, with no indication of the virus before having left on Friday, and recent sexual relations with my wife, she could have been the source of the infection—and could well be a Mary. Most protein nanoviruses relied on Maries—named after Typhoid Mary—to spread. The virus would never activate within the Mary, but would instead use that person to infect dozens or hundreds or thousands of people, before automatically disabling and exiting harmlessly. How many people the Mary would infect would depend on how difficult the nanovirus engineer wanted to make it to isolate and eradicate the virus for companies like Oberon.

By the time the vaccine was released, Alaka would get a call and a medical service team would be dispatched in Toronto. If she was the carrier, she would be understanding, I expect. If not, I was likely to be in the doghouse. But there was nothing else I could do; if I had not put in for the vaccine, I could easily find myself dead in a few days or less. I was already feeling sicker. My temperature was up, my heart was beating faster, and my breathing was shorter. No matter how deeply I breathed, no matter how fast I breathed, I still felt out of breath. My joints and muscles were sore, and there was nothing I could do about it. The over-the-counter pain blockers weren’t working.

I watched television for a while, and then found myself curious, and called up a search for news in Old Mexico, where there was indeed an epidemic—of hyperpox. There was nothing about the Mbig or Mbig-11 in Old Mexico, except isolated quarantined cases of Mbig. There had been some serious problems with Mbig in Old Mexico almost a year ago, but not an epidemic. Nothing at all about an Mbig-11. In fact, nothing about any Mbig variant other than the old MbigZ, anywhere that I could find. How could that be? Dr. Ponnuru knew his stuff; that’s why I went to him. He couldn’t have been that confused, could he?

Something was wrong. Something felt wrong. I felt sick again, and not just physically. Suddenly I wanted very desperately to talk to Alaka.

I dialed up her hotel in Toronto, and asked for her room number, but she wasn’t there. I dialed her direct number, but, again, she didn’t answer. That was almost unheard of. What was going on?

I didn’t really think I had much to worry about in regards to my private holdings, but I decided to check my accounts. I got my old laptop from the study and plugged it into the network port—the old IP network, though still supported as a sub-protocol, was not watched nearly as rigorously as the supernet, and there were still plenty of anonymous proxy servers in the third world to log in to and pass data in relative anonymity. This was how I always checked my accounts.

Nothing had changed. I had earned another $102 in interest for the day, but as long as the money was going up, and not down, I wasn’t concerned. No one knew about the accounts, other than me. Not even Alaka. Better safe than sorry, I had always thought. If my job at Oberon was about to collapse around me, I might have to make use of them sooner than I had planned, so it was comforting to see that everything was in order.

There was a great deal of money in the accounts—in excess of six million dollars, which was a lot of filthy lucre, even for a man of my position. The great majority of it came into my private holdings through early projects I had worked on at Oberon, closing loopholes and weaknesses in the financial transfer systems. Unfortunately, it was not in the form of the pay scale such excellent work deserved, but by exploiting the holes in the system before closing them. In the first year I worked at Oberon, I enjoyed a decent salary of $250,000, bonuses of $20,000, and over two million dollars of self-awarded cash. The next year, the same salary and nearly another two million, and then I had to repair the holes and fix the leaks, unless I wanted to risk an audit and rapid discovery. From that point forward, I felt I was set, and would play the game straight, and had enjoyed a solid career with a string of hefty raises and big bonuses. There had been occasional rumbling of an audit, but they were time consuming and slowed the business down, so the rumored audits had, so far, never happened. I moved up, from programming and accounting to consultancy and then management. But I always kept a careful eye on my money.

I disconnected the laptop and put it away. Everything was in order; the only thing that seemed to be in order, now, with my life. I returned to watching the television, and another hour passed. It was getting into the afternoon, and I began to wonder when I might hear about the vaccine. I put in a call to Dr. Ponnuru’s office, but could not get past the automated attendant answering the phones. I left an audiomemo to have him contact me, as soon as possible. I felt a little like I might actually vomit—something I had last done, to my recollection, in grade school. I was hot and sweating and was beginning to feel a little dizzy. The Mbig-11 was taking its toll.

I went to the bathroom and stepped up to the medscreen. I turned the privacy switch off, and instructed Tana to download the most recent dictionary of virus definitions from the FVC. Since Dr. Ponnuru had already put in the request for the vaccine and the FVC would have to have been notified—as was often the case with government bureaucracy, they were just being slow to get to me—I saw no harm in confirming what the medscreen at Dr. Ponnuru’s office had told me, as well as seeing how my weight and height were holding up. I stepped on the platform, and immediately the alarm went off.

“Medical alert, medical alert,“ Tana said. “Contacting Dr. Ponnuru. Notifying FVC—“

“That’s all already happened,” I told Tana. “Dr. Ponnuru—“

“New case filed with the FVC,” Tana said. “Response: Subject will be contacted shortly. Thank you for registering your medical alert with the FVC.”

“No, no,” I said. “There doesn’t need to be a new case filed for me, Dr. Ponnuru already filed one. I was in the office—“

I knew better than to expect a useful response from Tana to something like that, but I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly. “Response: Subject will be contacted shortly. Thank you for registering your medical alert the FVC,” Tana repeated.

“Okay, whatever,” I said. I’d clearly have to cross that bridge when I came to it. “Please tell me the nature of the medical alert.“

“Improbable inconsistency in core metrics,” Tana replied. “Your height as of this morning was 171.45 centimeters. Your height as of this afternoon is 162.10 centimeters. This is in excess of allowable variation. Your weight as of this morning was 82.34 kilograms. Your weight as of this afternoon is 81.02 kilograms. Your body temperature is 100.09 degrees Fahrenheit, indicating an irregularity in your body metabolism.  Your standing heartbeat is 92 beats per minute. Your normal heart rate is 57 beats per minute. Federal law requires that you notify the FVC and seek the counsel of your physician.”

“Thank you,” I said. My head was swimming. I had lost another 9 centimeters since this morning. At this rate, I’d be dead in no time. “Scan for infection.”

The scan lasted for a minute, after which Tana gave me the same report as this morning. “Irregularities detected. No recognizable signatures. You have a 87% chance of having been infected.”

“No recognizable signatures? Is the Mbig-11 in your virus definitions?”

“There is no Mbig-11 in the virus definitions. Definitions matching Mbig: Mbig, MbigZ.”

And that was it. MbigZ was a pornographic variant of the original Mbig that only enlarged certain parts of the body, and had been around almost as long as the Mbig.

“Place another call to Dr. Ponnuru—“

I was interrupted by high-pitched beeping. “There is a call for you coming in from the FVC. Federal law requires that you accept the call.”

“Of course I accept,” I said, walking out of the bathroom and sitting down in front of the television. The pleasant, lineless face of a young woman in a gray suit materialized.

 “Mr. Scott Whitesmith,” she said. “Your medscreen has filed a report with the FVC, reporting multiple bioscan anomalies—“

“I’m getting shorter,” I said. “It’s the Mbig-11 virus. It should be in the report—” I was about to say from Dr. Ponnuru. “Did you say my medscreen filed the report?”

“Yes, sir. Five minutes ago.”

“Did you get a report from Dr. Raja Ponnuru? For me?”

“We have no other reports for you. Please do not leave your location. A medical alert team will be dispatched to your apartment immediately. Your physician will be notified of the circumstances—”

“My physician already knows! He should have filed a report. He was going to request the—” I was going to say vaccine. But what vaccine was there going to be for the Mbig-11, if the Mbig-11 wasn’t even in the public virus definitions dictionary?

“You apartment is under lock down,” the woman said pleasantly. “Do not attempt to leave. A medical alert team is on their way.”

“Thank you,” I said, and doubled over, throwing up.

◊◊◊

I tried to place calls both to my wife and Dr. Ponnuru, without luck. I rummaged through the back of my closet and found what had previously been my tightest, smallest set of clothes, and put them on. The medical alert team arrive and, in shimmering black biohazard suits and masks, made me put on my own suit, at a distance, and then roughly led me to their transport. The suit was for a standard adult male, yet hung off me as if I were a child playing dress-up. It was hot and difficult to breathe, and many times I thought I would faint. Eventually they got me to a clean room at the FVC bureau office, and I was allowed to remove the suit.

Doctors and technicians poked and prodded at me, sexless in their glimmering black skins and mirrored visors. Even when they spoke, it was hard to tell.

“Does this hurt?”

“Where did you get this scar?”

“Are you going to regurgitate?”

After a while, they left, and then I was put in a small room with white walls, a very large mirror, and a single table. I had never been brought to the FVC for infection, but I had seen the process in operation many times, and this was not part of the process. Unless, during their investigation of the virus, they had become suspicious of something else. I was running a very hot fever, and was sweating bullets, but I suddenly felt a chill. And I thought: my accounts. They’ve been doing a background check and they’ve found out something. Somehow they’ve found out.

After what seemed too long, a man in light brown pants and a pull-over sweater entered the room and put a paper file down on the table. He appeared congenial enough, but he towered over me. Though he looked at me pleasantly, his tone was clear: “Mr. Whitesmith, did you really think we wouldn’t find out?”

I blanched. My thought was the same: the accounts. They’ve found them. I’m going to jail.

I tried my best to affect a look of innocent confusion. “Find out what? I don’t understand?”

“That you infected yourself the Mbig-11. That you wrote the Mbig-11.”

My jaw dropped. That was insane. The only thing that kept me from demanding a polygraph scan right then was the question: what if they changed tactics, and asked about the accounts?

“You must be—that’s insane. Why would I infect myself with this? Why would I write a virus like this, and infect myself—”

“To explain the infections of your coworkers?” the man asked. “There are three other people at Oberon infected with Mbig-11—Tomi Engdahl, Kamui Shiro and Djaga Kahonde. There are some people that you work with that you have a lot of difficulty with, isn’t that right?”

“I—” I hesitated. What the hell was this? “I want to see a lawyer.”

The man smiled benevolently. “This isn’t a legal proceeding. We’re just trying to protect the public health. Why did you have a privacy switch installed on your medscreen at home? You aren’t transgendered, are you?”

“I—no, of course not, it just in the line of work I’m in, it makes sense, to be able to control—”

“And how would you acquire a virus variant that, up until now, hasn’t been seen? It’s not even the FVC signature dictionary? And you have some experience in working with protein assemblers and coding nanoviruses—“

“Nanomechs,” I corrected. “For basic, non-biological applications—I don’t know anything about coding for nanomeds or nanoviruses—”

“Then, I must admit, I’m curious why, over the past year, you’ve downloaded so much viral construction and assembly information. Why specifically you downloaded a terabyte worth of analysis and structural information on the Mbig virus—“

I was shaking. I wasn’t sure if it was something to do with the virus inside me, or a reaction to the insanity this man was accusing me of. Either way, it didn’t look good, and I knew I had to have been set up. The others who were infected, most likely—Tomi Engdahl or Kamui Shiro, I thought. Or someone else at Oberon had gone after all of us.

“Also, I’m interested to learn why you spent so much of your time at home looking at the personal and profile websites of Tomi Engdahl, Kamui Shiro and Djaga Kahonde—the same three people who ended up also infected with the Mbig-11.”

“I’ve never been to their home pages. I could care less about that sort of crap. What the Hell is this?“

Although I don’t think he meant to, the man gave me my answer with his next question. Suddenly, I thought I knew exactly what this was.

“Why would you ask your physician to lie on your behalf?”

“I—I didn’t. I would never do that.” But why would they have asked that question, I thought immediately, unless Dr. Ponnuru had said something to them?

“Dr. Raja Ponnuru just testified that you requested he file your case as having been contracted from time out in the rural areas last week, even thought you had not been—”

“Dr. Ponnuru?” I asked blankly. “I just—I never did that—”

“Did you schedule an appointment, ostensibly to talk about vitamin therapy, only to reveal to Dr. Ponnuru that you were infected with a virus and that you wanted him to use his MDA off the clinic network, so as not to notify the FVC—”

“I—I do this for a living. I just wanted to make sure—”

The man smiled benevolently. “How would you feel if Oberon decided to do a full audit on all of your work, starting from your date of hire?”

I know I must have turned white as a sheet. I thought I was going to throw up. I did belch, loudly.

“You have five separate offshore accounts, balances totaling over two-million dollars—”

I tried not to react. First, to the terrible news that, legal proceeding at this moment or not, they knew about my private accounts. Then, to the odd assertion that there was only two-million dollars in them, when I knew I had well over six-million.

“Were you afraid your colleagues at work had found out? Is that it? And then you infected them—using yourself as the carrier, thinking that you could avoid suspicion for having authored the virus, if you infected yourself with it, also.”

He was now just making statements. I looked nervously to the mirror and then back to the man in the sweater. “I didn’t write the virus. I want a polygraph scan.”

“And you’re entitled to one, Mr. Whitesmith. Though, for that, you may want to wait for a lawyer.”

◊◊◊

I spent the next several hours in a small white cell, one that was growing increasingly larger to me. The polygraph scan was deemed inconclusive. Even though it cleared me of any wrong doing, including in regards to my private accounts, the techs agreed that I had gone through some form of modification therapy—of which there are several, mostly untraceable—in order to throw the polygraph off. I would have come to the same conclusion, had I been on the outside, but I knew I had never done a modification therapy to get around polygraph scanners. If it had been done, somebody had done it to me. And I thought I knew who.

It was Dr. Ponnuru. He had already made statements against me, statements he knew to be false, and it was entirely possibly he could have administered the polygraph modification therapy to me at any time, perhaps as recently as my last office visit to him. It certainly served its purpose—a conclusive polygraph could have damned me on my private accounts, but also served to finger Dr. Ponnuru, when my conflicting assertions with his account of our meeting tested true.

 But there was still so much I didn’t understand, and I was running out of time. I didn’t believe he could have infected me directly with the Mbig-11—it had been six months since I had been to his office, before that morning. But Alaka had been getting weekly vitamin insertions at his office; he could have easily made her the unwitting agent of my infection.

But why? If it had something to do with the sudden reduction of money in my private accounts, then I understood the why a little better. Then the big question became: how? How could he have known? How could he have gotten access to my accounts?

After a while, I was brought a small plate of food. I couldn’t eat; it didn’t taste right. My head was pounding, and I was having trouble focusing on anything—my eyes were not adjusting well to my shrinking head. Everything smelled bad. I kept belching, was suffering from repeated flatulence—which was both painful and embarrassing—and I was sweating like a pig. My clothes no longer fit me, so I just held them around my middle until an FVC officer brought me a generic gray jumpsuit for an adolescent boy. This fit snugly at first, but in half an hour was already loose. As my overall mass was reduced, there was less mass to dissipate, and the process was going progressively faster.

A pleasant female officer, probably Malaysian, I thought, brought me the notification of my indictment for twelve felony counts, including embezzlement and reckless endangerment and production of biohazardous materials. She also brought me the notice of my termination from Oberon. And then another notice, this in a black envelope from Harris & Feldstein, Attorneys at law. I opened it, and pulled out Alaka’s petition for divorce.

I collapsed backwards, then fell on the floor: Alaka.

Her signature was notarized—half-an-hour ago, at the downtown offices of Harris & Feldstein. When she was supposed to have been in Toronto until next Thursday. She hadn’t been in Toronto at all, I suddenly knew—she had been awaiting word from Dr. Ponnuru. If I tried to contest the divorce, she would simply have to invoke the Severance Clause from the Patriot II Act of 2038, that allowed spouses to divorce convicted or suspected felons, terrorists, detainees, etc without contest, in under twenty-four hours. She would only be guaranteed 50% of my assets and holdings if she did. But somehow I didn’t think she was going to be worrying about money.

I stood up and started banging on the door. “Check my eyes! I want somebody to check my eyes!”

◊◊◊

Dr. Kiesha nodded. “You have several nanocamera arrays in your left eye—only one in your right. Audio recorders and nanotransmitters in both ears.”

“Other than my cellular account?” I asked.

“This is not cellular equipment. Some if it is clearly surveillance. But, if you’re going to assert that your physician was spying on you, I’m afraid you’ll have a long road ahead of you. There’s nothing to identify the installer and I’m going to guess, based on previous experience, that the transmission targets are blindboxed, so you’ll never find out who they went to. And you could just as easily have done it to yourself—”

I sighed. I was exhausted, exasperated, nauseous, and everything hurt. “Why would I want to spy on myself?”

“To throw suspicion off, naturally,” she replied.

I collapsed on the floor and vomited.

◊◊◊

I spent the night in my cell, unable to sleep. I was sick and feverish and tossing and turning with the pain.

I could see my beautiful wife, my beautiful Alaka. So distant, so cold, yet on Friday night she had been on fire. I felt her mouth on mine, her body moving against me, and I could see it, the Mbig-11, passing from her lips to mine, slipping in between my skin cells, in through my hair follicles, as my hands caressed her dark skin.

I saw her with Dr. Ponnuru. He held the wand to her arm—the vitamin insertion. Only they weren’t just vitamins. I imagined I could hear him telling her, “It must be tonight. The infection must be well in progress before Monday.” And then they kiss, and she looks at him—she looks at Dr. Ponnuru—with warmth. With respect.

“Alaka,” I say to the empty cell. Where did it start? When did it start? How could she do this to me?

“He has more money, I know he does,” I could hear her say. “Sometimes, late at night—he gets out this antique computer of his. And he always does it just a little while before we buy something big, before we go on vacation—he’s hiding something from me. I know he is.”

“How terrible,” Dr. Ponnuru said. “I would never hide something from a beautiful woman like you.” He touched her shoulder softly. “I can help you find out. If you like.”

Over his shoulders, my eyes wandered as Dr. Ponnuru bowed his head, and Alaka raised hers. Their lips met. Above the medscreen table, among the dozen certificates and citations, I could see a degree in Advance Protein Mechanics from North Carolina University.

I saw Alaka, leaving our bed in the middle of the night, taking her eBook with her, reading frothy romances while running search after search on nanoviruses, protein engineering, and the Mbig virus. Did she give it over to Dr. Ponnuru? Or did he already know all that he needed to, and she was just doing her part to cement the story? So when they checked my search records—made legally permissible as another function of the Patriot Act II—they saw a consistent pattern of interest on my part?

“Don’t forget to call about our reservations in Tuscany next month,” the audiomemo she had left me that morning said in my mind. “I love you, Scott. Kiss-kiss-kiss!” Another plant, for the investigators to find—to help establish her innocence or irrelevance, and thus my guilt. Why would she have been asking me to check on next month’s trip to Tuscany, if she had been planning to run away? If she had been conspiring against me? The sudden divorce proceedings could be explained as her natural reaction to my terrible crimes. And the risks I exposed her too. Shit, shit, shit.

There was something else I saw, too. I saw Alaka visiting and then revisiting the home pages of Tomi Engdahl, Kamui Shiro and Djaga Kahonde, so that when they were infected it would appear, from my search records, that I had been scoping them out. But how did they get infected? I wondered. But it was too terrible. I already knew.

Alaka was in Los Angeles casting an infomercial for a new line of herbal insertion therapies. Only, it was over on Monday and she didn’t show back up at the apartment until Thursday. She was staying with Dr. Ponnuru—no, I thought. Too obvious. They only met on their appointments. She stayed with a friend, or at a hotel—there were hotels she could stay at where she would be sufficiently anonymous. And then she was at a club, or a bar, and she found Tomi Engdahl, and they were dancing, and Tomi was inebriated. He’s grabbing her, pawing at her, kissing her—hungrily taking the Mbig-11 into his mouth. Or maybe she took him back to her friend’s apartment. She had been pornographically obliging to me, her husband, to make sure I was infected—would she have done anything less with Tomi, Kamui, or Djaga? In my feverish head, I saw them all in bed together at the same time and I started crying.

◊◊◊

“They are still working on the vaccine,” Dr. Kiesha said. “It would help if you would cooperate.”

I shook my head slightly. Any movement was painful. They had administered coolants and narcotic pain blockers to me, which were helping. “I didn’t write the damned virus,” I told her. Again. My voice had begun to sound high pitched and squeaky, like I was breathing helium. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“Ah,” she says brightly. “Well, good news for you, at any rate—you seem to have stabilized at 91.38 inches.”

“Good news,” I said. I was less than three feet tall. The reduction had not been entirely proportional, so that although my head was smaller than normal, it was at least thirty percent larger, compared to my torso, than it had been. My legs were shorter, I think, but my arms were clearly longer in relationship to my body, and my hands, though small, were huge compared to the rest of me. I wasn’t getting any smaller, but now I had constant double vision, pounding headaches, terrible joint pain, and constant muscle spasms. I had to be fed intravenously, through protein, sugar and vitamin insertions. This kept me alive and conscious, but did nothing for the sickening combination of nausea and hunger that was now my constant companion.

“If the virus terminates itself, a vaccine may be unnecessary.”

“And then what?” I was asking how I could go about getting myself restored. But, Dr. Kiesha worked for the FVC, and saw my question through the prism of her job.

“You have your trial, then go to jail and serve your sentence,” she said.

◊◊◊

I suppose I should be grateful to both Alaka and Raja Ponnuru. If they had wanted to stay around and further discredit me and, indeed, damn me, they probably could have. I believe they would have gotten away with it. As it was, Dr. Ponnuru was the star witness for the prosecution at my trial, and he did not show up. Court was adjourned, and it was eventually determined that both my ex-wife and Raja Ponnuru had left the country. The subsequent investigation turned up plentiful evidence that Ponnuru had authored the Mbig-11, and that he had worked in concert with my wife to infect me and my co-workers. Their motive was clear: to steal from me the money that I had stolen.

So there was still another trial, and I went to jail. For two years, with time off for good behavior, rather than the potential fifteen to thirty years I would have been facing, as the author of a nanovirus.

Prison was not bad. I was able to earn 40 credit hours towards my law degree. I also underwent nanotherapy to restore my original height and weight, a process which required some expertise and expense. While it probably would not have been covered by my insurance on the outside, since I was in Federal prison the therapy, like my law education, was paid for by the American taxpayer. Bless you, my friend.

 As far as I knew, Raja Ponnuru and Alaka Whitesmith—I supposed, by then, Alaka Whitesmith-Ponnuru—were enjoying wedded bliss in a beautiful mountain chalet, in France or Spain or Brazil or India. Or any other country soft on crime and uncooperative with American extradition. They made a clean exit and, as far as I knew, it was never clear where they had ended up going. The two million dollars I had remaining in my private accounts was repaid to Oberon. I had a little under $500,000 in my regular accounts—cash, stocks, bonds, and other holdings—and, thanks to Alaka’s disappearance, didn’t have to split them with her. Which was a good thing, as the fine leveled for my embezzlement was $350,000.

After I finished law school, I joined a small firm in upstate New York that mostly handled labor law, but soon found myself running a division of the practice that specialized in suing both corporations and the government over just the sorts of policy issues I had worked on at Oberon. I didn’t have six million dollars in the bank—and I didn’t have any private accounts at all, any more—but I made a good living, and I liked what I did.

One of the paralegals who helped me out on all the tough cases was a young lady named Ayumi Kyoko. I told her all about my past, but I thought she was still a little sweet on me. I was moving slow on this one, though; Alaka and Dr. Ponnuru were always in the back of my mind.

◊◊◊

A few nights ago, Ayumi and I ordered take out from the new El Salvadorian restaurant down the street and took well-deserved evening off. While my health is still very important to me, Ayumi has helped me to lighten up a lot, and I don’t always insist on superprocessed foods at every meal. Ayumi doesn’t make any distinctions; she eats what she likes. I have thought and thought about it, but I don’t believe I had ever heard a woman belch or fart before. At least, not like Ayumi.

 Stuffing our faces and watching television, I made her stop on one of the random gossip, look-how-much-crap-this-celebtrity-has type of shows. I’m sure it wasn’t them, but something about the way the woman, Kukana Okelani, walked up the stairs to the house and lounged at the pool—the flick of her hand and how she scratched behind her ear–made me think of Alaka. The way the man—Indian investment guru, Darpak Shailendra—bounced once on his heels before he spoke made me think of Raja Ponnuru. The fact that they had come almost out of nowhere four years ago, and had built up a fortune totaling nearly ten billion dollars, also made me pause. They did not look like Raja and Alaka, exactly, but cosmetic therapies are not that expensive, and are widely available. And there was something familiar about both of them.

I sighed. It certainly seemed possible. While I had reduced, they had expanded. They had grown huge. And somehow, I doubted they had done it all by playing by the book. But, I thought, glancing over to Ayumi, I’d take my reduced life any day of the week.

They didn’t have anything to do with me any more, anyway. One day they’d meet their own Alaka Whitesmith and Dr. Ponnuru. If they hadn’t already.

The thought made me smile a little, and I touched Ayumi’s hand. I was beginning to think maybe it was time to reduce Dr. Ponnuru and Alaka, and what they had done to me, out of my memory entirely. It was time to remove and excrete that chunk of my life out altogether.

Ayumi smiled back at me. “What are you thinking?”

“That I’m going to buy you a ring. A cheesy, cheap ring with a fat counterfeit diamond—“

She laughed. “You? Buy me a ring? Why would you do that, Mr. Man?”

“I don’t know. I might ask you to marry me or something.”

 I smiled as Ayumi blushed furiously. “You would not! You said you never wanted to get married again, as long as you lived.”

I chuckled. “But life is always getting shorter. And that part of my life is getting smaller and smaller.”

She was still red as a beet. “Ha, ha. Very funny.”

On the television, Indian investment guru, Darpak Shailendra, was sharing some of his investment strategies with the wide-eyed interviewer. Then he abruptly changed the direction of the conversation, and started talking about his swimming pool. He was always doing that.

“You’ll see,” I said, and she would. I decided I would go ring-shopping—and not necessarily for cheap and cheesy—at the first opportunity. I squeezed her hand, then let it go. “I don’t think I want to let you get away.”

She laughed. “Scott, what’s wrong with you tonight? You never talk like this.”

I just smiled. “Pass me the mondongo,” I said. “And you can go ahead and change the channel.”