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eBook Category: Science Fiction Locus Poll Award Nominee
eBook Description: A Columbia University medical professor hunts down the carrier of a deadly virus who has inexplicably outlived the disease's short cycle of death ... and is spreading the infection throughout a string of small towns in rural North Carolina.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Interzone #102, 1995
Fictionwise Release Date: October 2001

56 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [55 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [45 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [40 KB] , Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [147 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [44 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [55 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [114 KB] , hiebook (KML) [120 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [75 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [37 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [46 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [73 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [63 KB]
Words: 12332
Reading time: 35-49 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Early in the pandemic, I'd pulled a few strings and arranged for a group of my students to observe a Silver Fire patient close up. It had seemed wrong to bury ourselves in the abstractions of maps and graphs, numerical models and extrapolations--however vital they were to the battle--without witnessing the real physical condition of an individual human being.

We didn't have to don biohazard suits; the young man lay in a glass-walled, hermetically sealed room. Tubes brought him oxygen, water, electrolytes and nutrients--along with antibiotics, antipyritics, immunosuppressants, and pain killers. No bed, no mattress; the patient was embedded in a transparent polymer gel: a kind of buoyant semi-solid which limited pressure sores and drew away the blood and lymphatic fluid weeping out through what used to be his skin.

I surprised myself by crying, silently and briefly, hot tears of anger. Rage dissipating into a vacuum; I knew there was no one to blame. Half the students had medical degrees--but if anything, they seemed more shaken than the green statisticians who'd never set foot in a trauma ward or an operating theater--probably because they could better imagine what the man would have been feeling without a skull full of opiates.

The official label for the condition was Systemic Fibrotic Viral Scleroderma--but SFVS was unpronounceable, and apparently people's eyes glazed over if news readers spelt out four whole letters. I used the new name like everyone else--but I never stopped loathing it. It was too fucking poetic by far.

When the Silver Fire virus infected fibroblasts in the subcutaneous connective tissue, it caused them to go into overdrive, manufacturing vast quantities of collagen--in a variant form transcribed from the normal gene but imperfectly assembled. This denatured protein formed solid plaques in the extracellular space, disrupting the nutrient flow to the dermis above--and eventually becoming so bulky as to shear it off completely. Silver Fire flayed you from within. A good strategy for releasing large amounts of virus, maybe--though when it had stumbled on the trick, no one knew. The presumed animal host in which the parent strain lived, benignly or otherwise, was yet to be found.

If the lymph-glistening sickly white of naked collagen plaques was "silver", the fever, the autoimmune response, and the sensation of being burned alive was "fire." Mercifully, the pain couldn't last long, either way. The standard First World palliative treatment included constant deep anaesthesia--and if you didn't get that level of high-tech intervention, you went into shock, fast, and died.

Two years after the first outbreaks, the origin of the virus remained unknown, a vaccine was still a remote prospect--and though patients could be kept alive almost indefinitely, all attempts to effect a cure by purging the body of the virus and grafting cultured skin had failed.

Four hundred thousand people had been infected, worldwide; nine out of ten were dead. Ironically, rapid onset due to malnutrition had all but eliminated Silver Fire in the poorest nations; most outbreaks in Africa had burned themselves out on the spot. The US not only had more hospitalized victims on life support, per capita, than any other nation; it was heading for the top of the list in the rate of new cases.

A handshake or even a ride in a packed bus could transmit the virus--with a low probability for each contact event, but it added up. The only thing that helped in the medium term was isolating potential carriers--and to date it had seemed that no one could remain infectious and healthy for long. If the "trail" Brecht's computers had found was more than a statistical mirage, cutting it short might save dozens of lives--and understanding it might save thousands.