She typed furiously on the laptop. A second later, the logo for Rook Quantum Sciences appeared.

“I’m in.”

Chapter 116

Chapter 116

Peyton tried the comm again.

“Desmond. Dad. Avery.”

She waited.

“Please respond.”

To Gretchen she said, “Why are the radios down?”

“I have no idea.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“It’s not really my department.”

“Meaning?”

Gretchen sighed. “Industrial espionage was one of the biggest risks we faced.”

“What does that mean?”

A humorless smile formed on the woman’s lips.

Peyton thought a moment. Yes, they would have done anything to prevent anyone from taking information off-site—including blocking electronic transmissions. “The building’s shielded, isn’t it? Comms won’t work inside.”

Gretchen’s silence confirmed her theory. If the administrative building was shielded as well, Avery wouldn’t be able to upload the location list via the satellite internet link. She needed to know that—quickly.

Even more concerning was what Peyton saw below—the massive machines manufacturing the cure. They were all wrong. Peyton had toured dozens of facilities that manufactured vaccines, antivirals, and monoclonal antibodies that fought infectious diseases. And they all had one thing in common: they were based on biological material.

Most vaccines were simply a form of the actual virus they provided immunity for. The vaccines for measles, mumps, rubella, oral polio, chicken pox, and shingles were weakened forms of the target viruses. The weakened forms reproduced poorly inside the body, allowing the immune system time to study and attack them. The body eventually manufactured antibodies, then committed the formula for those effective antibodies to memory—so that when the real virus appeared, the immune system could neutralize it quickly.

Another set of vaccines worked via a chemical process that inactivated the virus so it couldn’t replicate inside the body. The vaccines for polio, hepatitis A, influenza, and rabies worked that way. Inactivated vaccines had no chance of causing even a mild form of the disease they were inoculating against, making them ideal for anyone with a weakened immune system.

Vaccines, however, were mostly ineffective in treating patients already infected with a virus, especially if the pathogen was prone to mutation—as was the case with influenza and HIV. For patients already infected, antivirals were the key.

Like vaccines, many antivirals were grown from living matter. Monoclonal antibodies, for example, were predominantly grown in cell cultures that fused myeloma cells with mouse spleen cells that had been immunized with an antigen. Other antivirals were chemical in nature and targeted a virus’s protein layer or enzymes.

But whether vaccine or antiviral, the bottom line was that all known solutions to fighting a viral outbreak required a manufacturing process with a biological or chemical component. And here, Peyton saw no evidence of that. Was the cure a fake? Were the videos of Paris and Athens staged? Or was the Citium cure something else entirely? And if so, what would distributing it do?