Cerisa might be sloppy, but Nolan was methodical. He started with the first file listed, opened it, closed it, and went to the next one in the directory. His plan was to merely skim the opening words, looking for key phrases, and quickly put away anything that was not meant for his eyes. But curiosity got the better of him a couple of times when his searching led him to famous epidemics and well-known drugs that he hadn’t even known Cerisa had helped formulate. He could not help himself; he sat and read the entire histories contained in two files, and began to pay more attention to the details of every new case that he opened.

The designation “GGP” meant nothing to him but, by the time he had reached the G’s in the alphabetical listings, he had gotten into his rhythm. Open a file, scan the headers; if it sounded interesting, read on. If not, close it back up and move down the list. So he opened the file, ran his eyes over the reference line at the top of the page, and nearly fell out of his chair.

He read the reference line again, but it still said the same thing.

He read the introductory abstract, the paragraph outlining the project, its goals, its methodology, and its probable rate of success. He read the next twenty pages, describing the experiment as it was theorized and then enacted on a few carefully selected subjects. “One hundred percent success,” Cerisa had written. Based on her limited control group, she could not guarantee the same results on a larger case study, but she thought the results of the test were so positive that they could risk going ahead with the project without further experimentation.

Which, in her addendum, she noted had been done.

Nolan read the whole thing a second time.

He felt his heartbeat slow to a rate that would barely sustain life; he felt his body cool to the degree of hypothermia. He felt like an iceman sitting before Cerisa’s computer, a body so traumatized by shock that all its systems shut down. Not possible. Not possible. None of this could be true.

He read the report a third time, but by now that was unnecessary. He had memorized the whole thing, the analysis of the data, the cellular model arrayed in rotating 3-D on the screen. He could shut down Cerisa’s computer, go back to his own, and reconstruct the entire file.

He turned off the computer and sat for ten minutes in the shadowy room, staring at the blank screen, body motionless and the clattering activity of his brain at a complete standstill.