“Ninety-eight point six is a normal human body temperature, using the old Fahrenheit scale. Now look at the rest of the line. The seventy-two is probably heart rate. You’ve got respiration and blood pressure. I’m guessing the rest has to do with brain activity, kidney function, that sort of thing. Sara would probably understand it better than I do. But the most important thing is that they come in discrete groups. It’s pretty obvious if you look for the first number and see where the sequence remounts. I’m thinking this thing is a kind of body monitor, designed to transmit data to a mainframe. My guess is she was a patient of some kind.”

“A patient? Like in an infirmary?” Peter frowned. “No one could do this.”

“No one could now. And here’s where it gets more interesting. All told, there are five hundred forty-five thousand four hundred and six groups on the chip. The transmitter was set to cycle every ninety minutes. The rest was just arithmetic. Sixteen cycles a day times three hundred sixty-five days in a year.”

Peter felt like he was trying to take a sip of water from a blasting hose. “I’m sorry, Michael. You’ve lost me.”

Michael turned to face him. “I’m telling you that this thing in her neck has been taking her temperature every hour-and-a-half for a little more than ninety-three years. Ninety-three years, four months, and twenty-one days, to be exact. Amy NLN is a hundred years old.”

By the time his mind was able to bring Michael’s face back into focus, Peter realized he had collapsed into a chair.

“That’s impossible.”

Michael shrugged. “Okay, it’s impossible. But there’s no other way I can figure it. And remember the first partition? That word, USAMRIID? I recognized it right away. It stands for United States Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. There’s tons of stuff with USAMRIID all over it in the shed. Documents about the epidemic, lots of technical material.” He turned in his chair and directed Peter’s attention to the top of the screen. “See this here? This long string of numbers in the first line? That’s the mainframe’s digital signature.”

“The what?”

“Think of it as an address, the name of the system this little transmitter is looking for. You might think it was just gibberish, but if you look closely the numbers actually tell you more. This thing had to have some kind of onboard locator system, probably linked to a satellite. Old military stuff. So what you’re seeing are actually coordinates on a grid, and not anything fancy. It’s just longitude and latitude. Thirty-seven degrees, fifty-six minutes north by one hundred seven degrees, forty-nine minutes west. So, we go to the map—”