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Donald peered inside the pod Erskine had led hied wohter," Erskine said "My only child"

There was a moment of silence It allowed the faint hum of a thousand pods to be heard It could’ve been a choir ofthat sound, a quiet hum on so many closed lips

"When Thurman made the decision to wake his Anna, all I could drea the same But why? There was no reason, no need for her expertise Caroline was an accountant And besides, it wouldn’t be fair to drag her from her dreams"

Donald wanted to ask if it would ever be fair What world did Erskine expect his daughter to ever see again? When would she wake to a normal life? A pleasant life?

"When I found nanos in her blood, I knew this was the right thing to do" He turned to Donald "I know you’re looking for answers, son We all are This is a cruel world It’s always been a cruel world I spentfor ways toof an ideal But for every sot liketo tear things down And it only takes one of theet lucky"

Donald flashed back to the day Thuriven him The Order That thick book was the start of his plummet into e of ainfected, the paranoia that so hi the truth, he’d been infected long before that

"You weren’t poisoningsoether "The intervieith Thur all of thoseus"

Erskine nodded ever so slightly "We were healing you," he said

Donald felt a sudden flash of anger "Then why not heal everyone?" he deht Toproblem I wanted to build counterot to us Thurman had similar ideas He saw it as an invisible war, one we desperately needed to take to the ene, you see Me in the bloodstream, Thurht"

Erskine pulled a cloth frolasses He rubbed the in whispers from the walls "Victor said there would be no end to it He pointed to coht run rampant and cripple hundreds of millions of h, get out of control, and there would be an epidemic built on bits of code rather than strands of DNA"

"So what?" Donald asked "We’ve dealt with plagues before Why would this be different?" He swept his arms at the pods "Tell me how the solution isn’t worse than the problerier he would be if he heard this from Thurman He wondered if he’d been set up to have a kindlier er, take hiht he needed to hear It was hard not to be paranoid about being s still knotted to his joints

"Psychology," Erskine replied He put his glasses back on "This is where Victor set us straight, why our ideas would never work I’ll never forget the conversation We were sitting in the cafeteria at Walter Reed Thurman was there to hand out ribbons, but really to meet with the two of us" He shook his head "It was crowded in there If anyone knew the things ere discussing"

"Psychology," Donald reminded him "Tell me how this is better More people die this way"

Erskine snapped back to the present "That’s where rong, just like you Iine the first discovery that one of these epidemics was man-made--the panic, the violence that would ensue That’s where the end would come A typhoon kills a few hundred people, does a few billion in daers "We coether We put the pieces back But a terrorist’s boe, and it throws the world into tur off

"When there’s only God to blaive him When it’s our fellow man, we must destroy him"

Donald shook his head He didn’t knohat to believe But then he thought about the fear and rage he’d felt when he thought he’d been infected by so in that chamber Meanwhile, he never worried about the billions of creatures swi so since the day he was born

"We can’t tweak the genes of the food we eat without suspicion," Erskine added "We can pick and choose the naturally reat ear of corn, but we can’t do it with purpose Vic had dozens of examples like these He rattled theers as he counted "Vaccines versus natural i versus twins, ht The bastard alas It was the manmade part that would have caused the chaos It would be knowing that people were out to get us, that there was danger in the air we breathed"

Erskine paused for a

"You know, Vic once said that if these terrorists had an ounce of sense, they would’ve si on and then sat back to watch things burn on their own He said that’s all it would take, us knowing that it was happening, that the end of any of us could come silent, invisible, and any daround ourselves?" Donald ran his hands through his hair, trying to ht of a firefighting technique that always see of wide swaths of forest to prevent a fire fro And he knew in Iran, when oil wells were set ablaze during the first war, that soht the inferno with soreater

"Believe me," Erskine said, "I came up with my own complaints Endless co, it just took me a while to accept it Thurman on over et off this ball of rock, to start over But the cost of travel was too great"

"Why travel through space?" Donald said, "when you can travel through time?" He re roo off in search of another The oldthat very first day

Erskine’s eyes widened "Yes That was his arguh war, I suppose Me, I didn’t have Thurman’s experiences or the professionaldistance Vic enjoyed It was the analogy of the co these nanos like a new cyber war I knehat they could do, how fast they could restructure theone back and forth for ages, but there would’ve been no end to it Once it started, it would only stop ere no longer around And maybe not even then Every defense would become a blueprint for the next attack The air would choke with our invisible arhting without need of a host And once the public saw this and knew" he left the sentence unfinished

"Hysteria," Donald muttered

"Hysteria and homebrew If you think affordable DNA sequencers were a scare, or those cloning kits thatnanos in their basens on the web It would be worse than when they started printing those plastic guns in those cheap extruder kits Who knohat they hbor’s cat The next weekend, someone wipes out an entire species by accident"

"You said it one Does that lanced toward the ceiling "The world outside isn’t just being scrubbed of hu reset All of our experirace of God, it’ll be a very long tiain"

Donald remembered from orientation that the combined shifts would last five hundred years Half awas necessary? And as to keep the down that same path a second tiers? You don’t get the fire back in the box once you’ve unleashed it