Chapter 4: Beneficial Mutations
Perspective: Daniel
I was admittedly nervous. Also, this little meeting spot I had set up wasn’t nearly as cool as I thought it would be.
The back alley of Vitali’s smelled like burnt bread, rotten meat, old tomatoes, and moldy cheese; everything they had thrown out over the last couple of months. It felt more like I was meeting a drug dealer or arranging a hit on someone rather than the clandestine super spy scene I had envisioned. No super spy was ever half this nervous.
I checked my phone for the time, then unlocked it and checked for any new messages from Eddie. Nothing. He was supposed to be here ten minutes ago. Had he gone back on his decision? What if something had happened? If one of the protesters had seen him walking around out in the open, he could be—
"Hey, sorry."
I wheeled around to see the red fox anthro appear around the corner.
"I know I’m late." he said. "I couldn’t get away from work. We’re busy."
"I’m just glad you showed up." I sighed with relief. "What was it you wanted to talk about? Which apparently was too dangerous to talk about over IM?"
"Yeah." Eddie said. "What I’m about to tell you is top secret."
Okay, now it was feeling a little cooler.
"You remember I told you I work at the DARPA lab, where the virus was developed?" he asked. I nodded. "Well… I was in charge of the team that created it."
I nodded. I’d ended up looking Eddie up after our meeting and it wasn’t hard to figure out who he was.
"Yeah, I found that out, actually." I said. "Google."
"Right. I suppose it was all over the news…" he sighed.
"That must have been hard. With everything that’s happened, I mean." I said.
He sighed and looked down at the ground.
"It wasn’t supposed to… the virus, I mean, it should have been…" He stopped himself and looked up at me again, this time full of determination. "I have to know I can trust you," he said. "Show me something that proves you’re a furry… that you’re one of us."
I hesitated only for a second, then nodded, pulling out my phone. I knew immediately what to show him. I scrolled through my hidden photo album until I found it: a picture of an anthro wolf wearing a navy blue hoodie, with dark grey fur and blue eyes, smiling casually.
"Here." I said, turning the phone screen to face him.
"This is you?" he asked. I nodded, slipping the phone back in my pocket.
"My fursona. Shadow." I said. Then, after a second of silence, I added, "I’ve never shown that to anyone. I hope you can appreciate that."
Eddie nodded. There was another silence, this one longer, as he looked at the ground again.
"The virus wasn’t an accident." he said finally. "I mean, it was always supposed to be released, just not now. Later. When it was more developed, non-lethal."
"Right." I said. "Everyone knows that, I mean I saw the court hearing on TV. You… told the military it was a bioengineering project, or something?"
Eddie nodded solemnly.
"A viral drug to make soldiers faster, stronger, grant superhuman instincts and senses." he said.
"That was true." I said. "I mean the virus did do those things, right? You just didn’t tell them it would also give them an anthropomorphic animal form."
He nodded, smiling a bit.
"We’d planned to release it at a convention." he said.
"That’s… pretty smart, actually." I said. "It’s crowded, public, with people gathered from all over the world, to let it spread, but also somewhere most of the infected would be in the fandom. They’d want the transformation."
"They have us working on a vaccine for it now," he continued. "But we’re working on something else, too. A second strain."
My eyes widened and I leaned forward.
"Another virus?" I asked.
"We’re remaking it." Eddie said. "Finishing it. This time, it will do everything it’s supposed to. No one will die."
"And that’s… why you need me?" I asked. "As a test subject, for when it’s finished?"
"That’s not all." Eddie said. "We also have a website—or we’re going to. A deep web address that you can only get to with a link. It’s supposed to help rally others across the globe who support our cause, help us finish the virus and get more willing test subjects when it’s ready. I got the idea from our little chat yesterday."
My eyebrows went up.
"So… what’s that have to do with me?" I asked.
"I was hoping you’d help moderate." he said. "I saw your profile, apparently that’s something you’re good at. But you would have to pack up and leave with us. Like, now. Today."
I let out a heavy sigh, staring at the opposite wall of the alley.
"I understand it’s a lot to ask," Eddie said, "but we don’t have a lot of time."
"I’ll do it." I said. He raised his eyebrows.
"Yeah?" he asked. "Just like that?"
"I’m tired of sitting on my ass and watching the world go to hell." I said. "I wanna help."
He smiled.
"Well okay then." he said. "We’ll meet back here tomorrow and pick you up. Make sure you’re ready."
I nodded.
——
I snuck downstairs, hauling my bulging backpack and stuffed suitcase with me, which contained every article of clothing I could fit into them. I set them down gently and sighed, checking the time. Another hour until I was supposed to meet Eddie. I had spent all day yesterday daydreaming through my classes, wondering what my life would be like when I ran off with them.
Looking around the old house as the dim light of dawn crept through the windows, I remembered the childhood I had spent here, focusing for once on the good memories; the birthdays and Christmas dinners, watching fireflies dance around the yard in the summer. It was more than just the memories, though. It was the feeling of the house, the familiarity and comfort and the thought of safety and home. I was going to leave it all behind, at least for a while, maybe forever. For a moment, I lingered, unable to leave.
I looked out at the backyard, the neatly-trimmed grass covered in early morning dew. Mom used to loosely threaten to throw me out there and let the wolves eat me if I didn’t finish dinner. Little as I was at the time, I of course was unaware that there weren’t any wild wolves in or near Arlington, so the threat worked, up until I had imagined myself venturing into the forested area beyond our yard and befriending the hypothetical wolves instead of being eaten by them. I wondered with a smile if that was the first sign of what I would become today, the first sign of defiance against my mother and of my affinity for animals.
It hit me then that I had already gone too far to turn back. I had agreed to go onboard with Eddie and his team, and I couldn’t let them down now. If mom happened to wake up early and caught me, packed and ready to leave, I would have to explain myself, explain why I was running and where I was running to. And after all that, I would still sit down and watch the news and see everything going to shit. Nothing would have changed.
I turned back to the front door and grabbed the suitcase. Now was my chance to leave all of this behind, probably my only chance to make a real difference. I was going to take it.
——
I was picked up around noon in a nondescript grey van, which if you ask me was trying so hard to be inconspicuous it only made us more so, but I wasn’t about to question the camo-clad anthro raven in the driver’s seat.
In the back of the van were Eddie and two others, who he introduced to me as the rest of his team, the bio engineering geniuses who had created the virus—but of course I’d already seen them on TV. I greeted them awkwardly, introduced myself twice as awkwardly, and hauled my things into the van. It was weird, almost like I was packing for a spring break trip or something; heading off with a couple dozen pounds of clothes crammed into a suitcase and backpack, joining a group I knew only through their connection to one guy who I didn’t even know all that well. Except of course I had never been on such a trip, so what did I know? Mom barely let me go to the grocery store.
The trip was three hours (I figured correctly that they wouldn’t tell me where we were going. I also didn’t ask.) and after we had suffered through a long and awkward silence, we finally broke down and got into small talk. I could tell they were uncertain at first, and Eddie rather sheepishly admitted that he had only suggested bringing me along at the last minute, but eventually we got into a deep philosophical discussion about the fundamental nature of the universe and by the end of the trip I felt like I knew them all a bit better.
We arrived at the new base of operations, a repurposed warehouse, greeted by the small armed platoon apparently made up of loyal friends and followers to the scientist group.
"… and this is Tyler Dalton." Eddie said, gesturing to a deer anthro hunched behind a computer screen. "The two of you will be working together to create our website."
He barely glanced up, giving a simple nod in greeting.
"He’s working on the major coding right now." Eddie continued. "When he’s done with that, the two of you can talk about–"
"Done." the hacker said, leaning back in his chair.
"What? Really?" Eddie said.
"Yeah?" Tyler said, like he shouldn’t have been surprised. "Setting up a website’s easy. We’ve got top-notch hardware, our own secure server…"
"Right, well, I guess that leaves the two of you to decide how the site will look." Jess said. "Let us know when it’s up and running."
"Yeah, yeah, I’m sure you’ve got some sciencey stuff to get back to." Tyler scoffed.
They left, and an awkward silence lingered between the two of us.
"So, um… I’m not, like, a graphic designer or anything…" I said, "but I can provide some input on how we could put together the private chat rooms. I’m actually a moderator for a subreddit—"
"I know." he said. "I also know you were born in Minnesota, your father left before you were born, and you play a hell of a lot of Doom. Pun intended. I work in an elite cyber crime prevention task force. I looked you up."
"Oh… Right." was all I could think to say.
"Who do you think vetted you?" he asked. "You wouldn’t be here without my say-so."
He fixed me with a steely gaze and a raised eyebrow, examining my reaction, then he broke into a grin and laughed, like an old friend who had just played a prank on his buddy.
"Relax, I’m just messing with you." he said. "I did vet you, but you seem pretty cool. So, let’s talk about this website…"
——
We were up late working on the details for the Second Strain’s private deep site, designing the aesthetics of the pages and making sure each individual part lined up where it was supposed to and functioned as it should. It went online at 12:48 am that night and Tyler and I briefly celebrated the fact that it didn’t immediately crash.
Eventually, Eddie and the others emerged from the north side of the warehouse, which they had converted into their own makeshift laboratory. I wasn’t allowed in, of course, but from what I saw it was impressive. I hurried over to tell them the news, guiding them back over to Tyler’s impromptu command center of computer monitors.
"The site’s live." Tyler said, beaming. "We’ve already got a few thousand active members and there’s no sign that anyone’s hacked anything."
"Well, that’s good news." Eddie said.
"Best part, though, is that—"
"The chat rooms are up, too." I jumped in. "Which means we can start getting advice and talking to followers about how to finish this new virus."
Tyler raised an eyebrow at me with a smirk.
"Sorry." I said. "Did you want to tell them that part?"
"This is impressive, considering the small amount of time we’ve had to conceive the idea." Eddie said, raising his eyebrows.
"Well, like I said, making a website’s easy, it’s running it that’ll be the hard part." Tyler said.
"We’ve set it up so that you can’t access it without a link and a password, both of which are provided by us. Everyone already on the site is someone we know. Friends and colleagues and friends of friends, but eventually it’ll be more than that."
"There’s been a lot of traffic on the chat rooms already." I said. "I won’t pretend to understand most of it. There’s a lot of medical and biological jargon that you guys could probably make more sense of, but there was one discussion that interested me." I brought up a screenshot on my phone, showing the image of a chat captured from the website.
"Someone suggested we take a mutated strain of the virus already out in the public and use that to create the new virus?" Eddie mused.
I nodded.
"So, find someone who had a relatively smooth and painless transformation and work from there." I said.
"Don’t you guys have record of exactly that?" Tyler said suddenly. "Like, to record data about the virus, track it and stuff? You were coordinating with CDC field agents to make a vaccine before we shipped off, right?"
Eddie turned to the others, but there was an expression of dread in their features rather than the excitement I had expected.
"You guys thinking what I’m thinking?" he asked.
"What is it?" I asked.
"It just so happens we do know of the one person on the planet who experienced the fastest and smoothest human-to-anthro transformation…" Eddie sighed. "Gordon Grey."
The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. Was he famous, or…?
"Wait." Tyler said. "As in… THE Gordon Grey?"
"Yeah." Jason said. "The leader of the FSF."
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