Spiral

“Say on day one we have one person infected. And every day each infected person infects one more. At the end of one month, that adds up to over five hundred million.”

It was as if the air had been sucked out of the room.

40

THE JUMBO BOX OF MALTED MILK BALLS ARRIVED IN THE hands of Wally Atherton in his morning food package. Wally was a long-termer, had been in for twenty-two years, with only four to go. He ran a number of small businesses within the Hazelton prison. He was a middleman, making a living on the spread, trading cigarettes for junk food, and contraband booze for skin mags. He could even get you a cellphone if the price was right. Most of what he did was penny-ante, but on occasion he came across an opportunity to make some real cash.

This was far and away the biggest opportunity yet.

He’d first been contacted two months before, and he had been laying the groundwork since. The money was already flowing, building up in an account in a bank in Toledo, Ohio, his hometown. When he got out, he’d be a millionaire.

Atherton took the carton of malted milk balls, wrapped it in a bedsheet, put the buds from his iTouch in his ears, and started for the laundry room. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” serenaded him as he walked.

Once alone inside the laundry room, he placed the carton of malted milk balls on a folding table, opened it, and poured them out. They clattered and rolled, but the table had a little lip that kept them from falling to the floor. What the hell was malted milk, anyway?

He checked the chocolate balls until he found the specific one he was looking for. No malted anything here. It was a plastic sphere dipped in chocolate, designed to look and feel like all the other milk balls, but it was slightly larger. He popped it in his mouth and sucked off the chocolate. Then he wiped it down with a rag, took a razor blade he had stashed in his shoe and carefully cut the plastic shell open.

It split like a tiny egg. Inside was an amazing little thing.

A little mechanical spider, just as he’d been told. Glued to its back was the smallest damn camera he’d ever seen. The size of the dots on dice, no bigger. He leaned down to face it, then checked his iTouch. He could see his own face on the screen.

Wally hopped up on the table and set to work unscrewing the cover from the overhead vent. As he worked, he wondered if machines had a basic understanding of the world. They move, they respond, they move again. No free will, but an intelligence nonetheless. Wally was interested in free will. Someday a machine would have it, begin to carve out its own kind of meaning, he was sure. Not yet, but soon maybe.

This little bugger had no free will. It took its orders from the rich, faceless SOB who’d paid Wally one-point-four million dollars. This little bugger was an instrument of his will. Not that different from Wallace Atherton.

He did as ordered, placed the little Crawler in the duct, pointed it in the right direction. Then he hit the app on his iTouch and the Crawler took off down the vent, skittering away, Wally guiding it by running his finger across the screen. The sound of its legs was a delicate, almost lovely clitter-clatter.

To Wally it sounded like the echo of future coins of gold.

KITANO REMINISCED, FLAMES BURNING BRIGHT IN HIS MIND. Dunne was not due for another hour. In the meantime, Kitano had his memories. As he grew older, he found that the present became hazier, more like a dream, but the past became clearer and clearer. It was as if the past was real, the present only a shadow. His true self lived there, still watching, still waiting, still reliving the events of 1945.

By summer, the war against the Americans in the Pacific was lost. Tokkō was Japan’s doomed, romantic last-ditch effort to change the tide of the war against the imperialist Westerners. Machines of steel had failed. The machines of flesh were the last hope. Thousands of young Japanese soldiers, bravely piloting planes, boats, and human-guided torpedoes on one-way missions aimed at the heart of the enemy. In the West, they would be known by another Japanese name, a word that translates as “God-wind,” after a pair of typhoons that destroyed a Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century.

God-wind. Kamikaze.

But even this could not stop the Americans.

August had arrived hot and bleak in northern China. The Soviets were amassing to the north. All was in chaos. An entirely new kind of bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, reducing them to rubble in seconds. The Soviets launched their attack, cutting through the lines of the Japanese Kwantung Army with ease. All was nearly lost. They would overrun Unit 731 within days.

The order came. All remaining prisoners killed, all records destroyed.