Beagles and Birdbrains

In the moment I knew I was going to die, it wasn’t my whole life that flashed before my eyes, but the memory of my first job, right after graduation, with my newly minted Masters in Science. The assignment was to teach birds the wrong song. From incubation in the egg to maturity, we played recordings of the oriole song to robins, and the robin song to phoebes, and the phoebe song to the wood thrush. Success was measured by the confusion of the young male birds, and if they actually sang the wrong song, we broke out the champagne and promptly euthanized and dissected the subjects to discover what havoc we had wrought upon their little bird brains. We learned nothing, but no matter. We met the conditions of our funding. The question was always can we do it, never, should we?

I couldn’t imagine then, but there was a straight line between that early experiment and twenty years later, when I became the most sought after fugitive in the world, with the potential destruction of humankind packed into a plastic wrapper within a heart-shaped locket dangling at my neck. Holed up in a fleabag motel in Poughkeepsie, stuffing my mousy brown hair into a blond wig and trying on makeup for the first time in my life.

None of these simple measures would outsmart facial recognition software, but might buy enough time to reach Eva at the New York Times, to tell her the facts, to counter everything they were saying about me on the news. I’m not the one trying to exterminate humanity, but I know who is.

My saga began when a billionaire, Milo Rasmussen, became interested in my colleague Carl’s work and offered to fund his project. Carl was conducting gain-of-function research on avian flu. His hopped-up bird virus had a 90% mortality rate, and was much more contagious than ordinary influenza. I was added to the team and for months, I worked beside him, developing a vaccine.

One night, we joined Milo for drinks after work, and on his fourth scotch, he began babbling about how the Earth could only support two billion people, not eight billion, and therefore six billion had to go. And through his drunken ramblings, his plan became clear: vaccinate the worthy, and let the unworthy die. And Milo—this flawed individual whose only redeeming virtue was manipulating the system and accumulating capital—would become a one-man force of evolution, deciding who should live and who should die.

Leaving the bar, Carl defended Milo’s statistics about the population problem. “We’re heading towards extinction anyway, and dragging all other life forms down with us. In a way, releasing the virus in a crowded airport would actually be saving all life on earth—including humans.”

It’s understandable how Carl could get sucked into this scheme. Like most lab technicians, he’d been desensitized to suffering. Never was there a better training ground for serial killers than the research lab. It was considered the worst kind of soppy sentimentalism to care about test subjects – the kittens and puppies and monkeys and the beagles, the kind beagles, chosen for their innate eagerness to please, their sweet dispositions, for which they were rewarded with unimaginable cruelties.

That night, I returned to the lab and destroyed all our research and most of the virus. I saved a smidgen of the white powder and packed it into a thin plastic membrane and shoved it into this heart-shaped locket. For my own protection, I needed evidence that the virus was real. Still, there were risks taking it outside the lab: the slightest wisp of white powder would set off a pandemic.

Milo must have called the authorities, assigned me his motives, created a counter narrative of the mad scientist hell-bent on releasing the virus into the population. I couldn’t call Eva to change the plan we’d made earlier in case the FBI was listening. When I first contacted her, I thought I could waltz into her office with the evidence. Now I feared Special Agent Crackshot would put a bullet through my brain before I could spill the beans. My advantage was they would expect me to go to an airport, not to see a reporter.

While waiting for the appointed time, I paced the room, practicing what I would say to Eva.

“Do you think for one second that Milo really thought through what this engineered catastrophe would look like?

“Covid-19 was not a preview of coming horrors. The difference between a one percent death rate and ninety percent? It’s not even a question of hospitals overrun, and refrigerated morgue trucks, or wondering when your kids are going back to school. There are no healthcare workers because they were the first to die. The teachers died, or fled, and you’re lucky if your kids aren’t infected.

“Let’s say you were able to ride it out. It could be months. Do you have enough food for that? Let’s say you do.

“If civilization began to collapse – which it would – and there was no one to keep the electricity flowing through the grid, you wouldn’t have water to drink, much less to shower or flush the toilet. You’d hear the moan of neighbors as they begged for help, you’d smell them once they died. You’re locked up in a smelly, dark apartment with kids who have never spent an hour without an electronic device and so they’re having profound meltdowns of their own because during this pandemic, there’s no entertainment to stream, there’s no internet, or phones. Nothing to take your mind off the fact that you’re stuck in limited space with nothing to do.

“And let’s say you try to risk it, to leave the city, on foot, of course, because there’s no transportation. The houses that you enter may be empty from the flu, which you could still catch, or there could be a wacko lying in wait with his guns and ammo.”

I imagined looking to Eva for her reaction, but realized that she’d seen the movies about the zombie apocalypse, so none of this was really new to her.

Milo no doubt had watched doomsday movies from his well-stocked panic room and had envisioned these horrific scenarios, but thought he could stomach them. He felt no more sympathy for the human tragedies he would set in motion than a researcher would for the dog that affectionately licked the hand wielding the syringe right before being injected with anesthetic so he wouldn’t feel it when his spine was severed. For Milo, just like for the researcher, the ends always justified the means.

And what were those ends? We would stop adding new carbon to the atmosphere. No cars, no planes, no fast food, no more useless stuff ordered online. For Carl and Milo, they imagined the carbon cycle returning to its pre-industrial state. They and their friends and family would be vaccinated, while other nameless strangers would have to endure a great deal of pain. But in the end, the world would be saved, with only the best, the ones chosen by Milo, surviving.

What he didn’t understand is that the complexity of our society can’t be undone neatly. We can’t just vanish at this point and leave our mess behind. Who would clean up the tons of plastic trash polluting the ocean? Not to mention more than 400 nuclear power plants around the world that, with no one to tend them, would overheat and melt down, one by one, making entire swaths of the planet uninhabitable for the next 700 million years. As for the petrochemical plants, with no one to flip switches and open release valves, the machinery would explode and belch a toxic plume into the air, killing everything in its path. Euthanasia-by-influenza is the easy way out. Much harder is to stick around and clean up our mess.”

That’s what I’ll tell Eva, the reporter… if I can get through to her. My disguise is a pair of enormous dark sunglasses, my platinum blond hair, and gaudy red lipstick. If it were winter, I could hide under coat and scarf. Instead, I’m in a light blue summer dress and sandals. Out of place is the briefcase, which I dare not leave behind. It’s got all the corroborating evidence: our notes, and a vial of vaccine. The proof.

I catch the train to Grand Central Station. On the shuttle to Times Square, an inebriated man steps on my sandaled foot, crushing my little toe. Stifling a cry of pain, I step aside, my toe throbbing. When the doors open, I’m swept along with the throngs of people up the urine-soaked stairs.

I’m very careful at the intersections. I can’t afford to get hit by a car, or knocked down by a bike messenger. If the locket was damaged and the powder escaped, then I really would be the madwoman scientist, the worst mass murderer in history. My hand goes to the locket. A thief might yank the chain off my neck. The locket feels solid. It’s silver, but surely not real silver—must be silver plate. It was my grandmother’s, and she never saw the point of the real stuff when the fake looked just as good. What if someone thought it was valuable and snatched it? The more I put my hand to it, the more I hug my briefcase, the more these things will seem valuable and be more in danger of being stolen. I need to chill. I need to get to Eva’s office. Then I’ll be safe.

At newsstands, the front pages are all ablaze with my plain scientist’s face: no makeup and stringy brown hair. How dowdy I was! I can’t help comparing the old me to my reflection in shop windows. How changed I am now, my cherry red lips smiling.

In the reporter’s office, I’ll let her have a look at the package inside my locket, the thin plastic membrane that separates humanity from total chaos. She’ll write about it, and when humanity learns how close it came to having a billionaire swat them like insects, when they understand why he was doing it, they’ll understand that they have to change, that it’s urgent, that there’s no more time to waste.

When I enter the Times building, there are two security guards, one white, one black, and a conveyor belt, and an x-ray machine, just like at the airport. The black guard puts his hand on my briefcase, and I realize now what a mistake, what a fatal mistake it was to bring the vial of vaccine, which will set off alarm bells. I look up into his eyes. They’re brown and shiny and kindly, like a beagle’s.

I try to seem casual when I unlatch the briefcase, palm the vial of liquid. “Maybe you could call Eva, tell her I’m here.”

But I can’t give him my name. What name could I use? And then I notice them, perched in the corner: Special Agent Crackshot and his sidekick. They’ve seen me. Why were they waiting for me? It could only be Eva. She must have believed the reports that I was armed with a deadly pathogen that I planned to release. She alerted them I’d be here. They’re ordering me to set the vial down on the counter. But they don’t understand. I’m the one who wants them to live. I want them to li—

**********************************************************************

Special Agent Frasier stood over her dead body and pried the vial from her hand.

“Looks like we were just in time.”

He and Special Agent Frisk were unmoved by the traumatized bystanders who had witnessed the shooting. A much larger tragedy, the potential mass extinction of all humans, had been averted.

“Nice shot, by the way,” said Frasier. “Right through that heart-shaped locket.”