Every Last Drop by Charlie Huston Page B

against the desk, opens a cigarette box and takes out a clove. —And that place. It's a whole different headache.  Cause the Vyrus, It's testy as hell. It's really, what's so sad, it's really a pussy. I mean, there are other viruses that are way more robust. Think about it.
She comes over and puts her cigarette in her mouth and leans in. —Light?
I snap a match and she touches her cigarette to it.
—Thanks.
She moves away, blows a cloud.
—Think about it. The Vyrus, it can only live inside the human body. It can only survive in a human body. It can only spread itself blood to blood. And it's so hyper, it colonizes host cells so quickly and burns them out, that it needs to have its environment constant/y refreshed. And it kills its host and rarely gets a chance to reproduce. I mean, is that inefficient or what? Seriously, it is one crap piece of engineering. One of those evolutionary steps that's so random and poorly designed that it actually proves evolution. I mean, why would God bother with a thing like that? Intelligent design? Not.
She crosses to the window. Lifts the hook that holds the shutters closed behind the curtains.
—Something fussy like that, just getting a look at it is a pain. Creating a stable environment for it outside a host? Talk about tedious. And then, a thing like this, finding a cure for a virus, you don't do that alone. Not even when you're smarter than everyone else.
She opens the shutter a crack, puts her hand through and parts the curtain. —There's just way too much busy work. I mean. Cultures, batches of this and that, computer modeling, archiving. Its like working on a code. Like how when
they try to break a code they sometimes give just a piece of it to each team. So they don't really know what they're working on. Keep them isolated from one another. I have to do that. I mean, the lab I assembled for this at Horde Bio Tech, it's not staffed with assholes. Well, some of them are assholes, but they're really fucking smart assholes. Show these people the whole Vyrus, let them get a good look at it and see its behavior? You will see some serious freaking out. But.
She turns, light from a streetlamp drops through the curtain and crosses her face, makes her perfect skin glow. —It is amazing.
She lifts her hand to the light, stares at it reflected there. —That's one of the things that's amazing. Light. Like we've been doing things with light. These guys at ASU, they've been blasting viruses in blood samples with a laser. Like fifty megawatts per square centimeter. Which isn't half as nasty as it sounds. And so, like, we've known for a long time you can kill viruses with UV radiation, but that causes mutation. And mutation leads to adaptation over time. So, these guys, they've been using visible light pulses. And it works. It.
She holds up her cigarette, wiggles it, creating a jagged stream of smoke. —It vibrates a virus, physically disrupts the virus shell, this thing called the
capsid. It cripples the virus it affects. Virus cant function, and dies. So.
Her eyes are big, staring a million miles.
—The Vyrus, your Vyrus, goes haywire when exposed to solar UVA, it mutates. But not adaptive mutations. Or not that we can see because it happens way too fast. But, but, maybe we can find a wave of radiation, a visible wavelength to shatter the Vyrus1 capsid? It's so, it's way outside the box, but the Vyrus isn't in the box, so this is the kind of stuff we have to. I mean.
She stares farther, going away from the room, deep inside some other place. —It is so fucking cool.
She takes a big drag.
—It's like, like being a pioneer. Like none of the rules apply and you can try anything. Anything. Nothing is out of bounds. And. Oh, and I said about computer models. The good thing about having too many people here, it gives us a really good pool to draw samples from. And, because the Vyrus, it does mutate. Radically. From person to person. I mean, we've got a couple people here who infected other