Eden Plague - Latest Edition by David VanDyke Page A

low-level threat. It means we got breathing room, and it means we might be able to extract your girl Elise, get her away clean and pump her for everything she knows. Figure our next move from there.”
    My girl Elise. Funny how that sounds good, though I only spent maybe fifteen minutes with her total
. They all stared at each other for a few seconds, then Daniel stuck his hand up. “I’m in.”
    “Me too,” said Vinny.
    Spooky grunted affirmatively.
    Zeke grinned even wider. “God, it feels good to be operational again.”
    “On your own dime, though,” Daniel said wryly.
    “If this thing turns out to be real and usable and helps Ricky, I’d sell everything I have to get it.”
    Daniel knew Zeke was dead serious. He loved that kid.
    “Well, I got twenty grand you can use.” He took out and tossed Zeke the packet of cash.
    “Sweet.”

-9-
     
    Elise ran the gene sequence simulation for the ninth time. It showed what every other test had – that the virtue effect couldn’t be separated from the other parts of the healing effect. If the virus healed the body, it would heal the brain. If the brain was healed, the mind tended to follow. Old dysfunctional patterns might stay for a while, like a drug addict cured of the physical addiction but remembering the habits – but sooner or later those evils would be cleansed. A healthy mind just wouldn’t let people be comfortable with their cruel, hurtful, antisocial ways anymore.  Oh, it wasn’t a perfect cure for bad behavior, but it would take a strong will and a really good reason to override the virtue effect, the strengthened conscience.
    Durgan was just a medical doctor, and a rather out-of-date one at that. His real skills were bureaucratic and political. He wasn’t current enough on genetics and virology to see the truth that she saw: that what he wanted was impossible. It simply couldn’t be done by manipulating the virus. The only approach was to somehow counteract it within the brain and endocrine system, the main regulators of mood, emotion, morality – conscience.
    She had thought of many possibilities – electrodes that stimulated the medulla oblongata, the seat of anger and aggression, or heavy doses of stimulants, or lowering blood sugar, or psychotropics – but nothing that was reliable, or permanent.
    Nothing she was willing to try, either, or tell them about.
    If Durgan – or his shadowy unnamed boss – was half as smart as he thought he was, he would have a completely different lab team, hand-picked for their ruthless amorality, doing those kinds of experiments. Like the CIA tests back in the sixties, with LSD and things like that. Mind control.
    Maybe they were. But she couldn’t do anything about it. All she could do was keep wasting her time running useless tests that she already knew would fail. Burning up time. Hoping her long shot would pay off.
    Daniel, where are you!
    She reached out with her soul, not really believing in anything so…unscientific… but hoping anyway.
    Pleading with a God she didn’t believe in.
    Please bring him here.
    ***
     
    Vinny kept at his cyber-research with his Uncle Spooky standing over him. That probably didn’t help much. Zeke eventually said something to the elder Nguyen, so he stalked away to do sneaky Spooky things.
    Zeke and Daniel cut back a few bushes that were crowding the cabin, and caught up on personal history. Daniel felt elated but a bit fidgety, waiting on information, like the part between the warning order and the op order, when he knew he had to prepare for something but not for what. Waiting on the intel, which was always the best that could be had but was never as good as you wanted.
    Intel specialists.  Poor schmucks, usually scrawny googly-eyed nerds with oversized Adam’s apples and way too much trivia packed into their noggins. And the worst thing was, for them, if they provided a perfect assessment, everyone just got on with the mission and no one remembered. If they missed