Paradeisia: Origin of Paradise (16 page)

“Have you heard the phrase 'mum has eyes in the back of her head?'  Well,
it is no fallacy.  It is true.  She did; you simply couldn't see them.

“Each of you, I guarantee, has had the feeling
at some time that you are being stared at, and when you looked up, there was someone peering at you.  Now women have this feeling more frequently than men because men are usually the ones doing the staring.”  Chuckles spread across the auditorium.

“We have always attributed this feeling to peripheral vision or some such thing...  But this is nonsense.  Studies and tests of all sorts have shown that, indeed, people are frequently aware when they are being looked at, even if they have no physical or natural way of knowing it.

“That is why, in the security industry, it is well known that if you stare at a suspicious person through closed circuit video, they are much less likely to attempt a theft.  They
know
you are watching, intuitively.  It is perhaps why, when someone is about to tap your shoulder from behind, the nerves have fired in your brain to turn your head before their finger has reached you.  This is a verified, scientific fact.

“It is this intuition, 'the sense of being stared at' as I call it, that cannot be explained by science as we know it.  Even animals have this sense.  Try staring at your cat at home from behind, and it
won't take long for him to peep back at you with suspicion, or to slink away in anxiety.”

“So what is this intuition?  Where does this sixth sense come from?”

CDC

Doctor Compton opened the meeting.  “So you are all aware that we've had a total of five official cases of the virus.  Four of those have resulted in sudden death.  The last is in critical condition.”

Everyone in the room nodded, including Karen.  This time the group comprised more than just those from the CDC.  There were representatives from many other branches of government as well.

“Now Doctor Guy Giordano has been heading up the effort at the USAMRIID in Ft. Detrick where they have one of the only BSL-4 facilities in the nation.  He has some information to share.”  He motioned to Doctor Giordano.

Everyone turned to look at the jeans-wearing Italian.  When Karen saw who it was, she muttered an expletive. 

Doctor Giordano stood.  “Thanks, guys,” he said, swaying from side to side awkwardly.  He took his hat off.  It just didn't seem right to speak about something that had killed four people while wearing a ball cap, no matter how much he loved the Phillies.

“What have you found?” Karen asked, rapping her fingers on the table.  “Let's keep things moving here.”

“Well, some of this information came from other labs—Army Medical will mostly be involved in the effort to stop the virus medicinally.  But the biggest thing everyone's noticed about the virus so far is that every victim has been female.”

Someone said, “How can that be?  I've never heard of a virus that attacks a single sex.  Males and females have the same genes, after all.”

“Well that's precisely what we thought.  So in examining the first victim, we kept that in mind.  The original pathologist noted that the body was still hot inside by the time he examined it.  So he knew she had suffered a tremendous fever.  He also noted something else.  She had hepatitis.  It wasn't severe yet, but it was present.”

“
This is just hepatitis?” someone interjected.  “All this over
hepatitis
?”

“No,
hepatitis just means inflammation of the liver.  Her liver was inflamed.

“Now, s
ince the pathologist noted that she did not have a thyroid gland, we looked into it.  When we ran her blood work, her thyroid levels were through the roof.  So we thought, maybe the missing gland was congenital; maybe she was born that way and has been on pills ever since to compensate and this time she way overdosed.  But, wrong, she had no history of problems at all.  Was never on thyroid pills.

“
So the conclusion is that the gland was removed before she reached the morgue.  Now it was noted that the paramedics had tried to administer air directly to her lungs via her trachea.  I’ve never heard of paramedics doing that before, but since they likely did not know what they were doing it's possible that something went wrong there and the gland was disposed of.  We are going to hunt them down and talk with them about that.

“When we ran the other victims' hormone levels, though, we found highly elevated serum T3 and T4, thyroid hormones, but suppressed TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone).  So this single common factor between every victim: elevated thyroid levels, told us they had all died of the same thing: thyroid storm.”

“What's that?” someone asked.

“It's when your thyroid starts producing so much hormone that your metabolism goes crazy, your heart rate goes nuts, blood pressure shoots through the roof, and you get a deadly high fever.  Usually, you get jaundice, which is yellowing of the eyes and skin.  Children or teenagers who have a thyroid storm episode often suffer from intense seizures.

“In this case, it's the storm of storms.  Their temperature goes to extremes we may have never seen before.  Their capillaries rupture from powerful blood pressure.  It's apparently so rapid and so intense that the victim dies within minutes.  After the thyroid storm has set in, each of these victims has been dead within an hour.  So it appears that the virus is attacking cells in the thyroid gland, setting off this response.

“Now women are known to have an extremely strong immune response thanks to estrogen; that's why they suffer from thyroid disease more frequently than men.  To be more specific, five times more often.  So when the virus starts reproducing in the thyroid gland, these dames' immune systems start attacking the gland itself, which in turn causes it to produce incredible quantities of hormones. 

“Now the only woman who has come down with symptoms but hasn't died is a lady over fifty.  She's already had menopause, so her immune system has slowed down because she doesn't have as much estrogen.  We also suspect that girls under eight would be less vulnerable because they haven't started producing high levels of estrogen yet.”

“So what do we do to stop it?” Karen asked.

“Well, we know that none of these women we've investigated so far has had any thyroid problem before, so we think we can exclusively blame the virus for the thyroid storm.  We also know that for every five women who get the symptoms, only one man will, so we could have a lot of male carriers out there who don't even know they have it.

“Also, there are no symptoms at all until the thyroid storm starts, so it is difficult to know who might be infected until it is too late.  We don't have any treatment for the virus, specifically.  If the body can't fight off the virus by itself, it might become necessary to kill the thyroid gland so that they can survive.

“Unfortunately, since it comes on so fast, it's not likely that we
could
treat anyone in time and even once their symptoms were being treated, there's of course nothing to do about the virus itself.”

Karen said, “So basically what you're telling us is that we know a lot more about it, but we're still screwed.”

Doctor Compton said, “Thanks to Doctor Giordano's team, we can test to see if someone is infected, but it is a long process and couldn't be done on a mass scale yet.”  He paused, “Basically it comes down to this: a vaccine must be developed, and it must be developed soon.”

Doctor Giordano said, “There is another option, actually.”

Every head turned to him.

“What would that be?” Karen asked.

China Academy of Sciences

“Radioisotope dating works this way:  After molten rock cools, it has a specific time known as a half-life in which certain elements decay and ultimately produce stable, daughter elements.  For uranium, the ultimate daughter is lead.  For carbon, the ultimate daughter is nitrogen.  There are several elements with known half-lives, and these are the ones that we use to date radiometrically.

“Dinosaurs are frequently found in limestone—a material that cannot be dated radiometrically because it's a sedimentary rock formed by the skeletons of tiny marine organisms, not molten rock that cooled.  For this reason, the required elements for radioisotope dating have to be found around or inside this limestone, or at least as near it as possible.

“The problem is that assumptions about the history of the rock being used to assign the date must be made, and the assumptions are often based upon the types of fossils found near them.”

“I'm not following...” Zhang stated.

“For example, the originating conditions of the rock have to be
assumed
, specifically which elements were in the rock when it was first formed.  And the decay rate of the element has to be assumed to be constant.  And it also must be assumed that the environmental conditions have been consistent: that external forces have not acted upon the elements to alter the decay rate.

“These assumptions are all applied as filters to try to ascertain the date of that rock, but of course any assumption could be very wrong—particularly assumptions made about things that have happened in prehistory when nobody was there to see them.  And they only tell us something, if anything, about that rock: they tell us nothing about the ac
tual fossil we found near it.”

Leaning forward, Doctor Ming-Zhen said, “I performed a little unorthodox experiment.  I sent samples to various laboratories for analysis.”
  Although Doctor Ming-Zhen knew these samples originated at modern volcanoes where the date of formation was well documented (one sample came from a lava eruption merely twenty years prior), he had not mentioned this to the labs.  He had simply requested that the labs date the rocks.

“The dates that were assigned by the laboratories were consistently, egregiously wrong.  In fact, the twenty-year-old sample was dated to between five hundred thousand and three million years old.

“Of course, I know my colleagues would say I manipulated the samples, or I didn't know what I was doing, or that if a radioisotope expert had performed my experiment, the correct results from the labs could have been assured.”  He leaned back, clasping his hands together over his stomach.  “As with any subjective art-form, fault can be found everywhere, by everyone.”

After a moment of silence, Zhang asked, “So what is the point of all of this?  Do you have an actionable proposal for Antarctica or do you just talk to excess?”

“My proposal is that we go to Antarctica and find this dinosaur DNA.”

“Ah, I see.  Only that.  A simple
stroll down to Antarctica and pick up the nearest preserved dinosaur DNA we find.”

“Something along those lines, yes.” 
Doctor Ming-Zhen felt his superior's eyes upon him, studying him contemplatively.

Zhang finally said, “I am under great pressure by the State to remove you from the Academy.”

“I understand,” Doctor Ming-Zhen replied calmly.

“If I asked you to resign, would you do so?”

“Certainly I would do anything you asked.”

“The State is keen to redeem China from the disgrace of these overwhelming accusations of fraudulence...”

Doctor Ming-Zhen looked down, sensing his fate.  He would have to resign; his career was certainly over.  What would he do to support his family?  His daughter was only three years old.

Zhang clenched his jaw and said firmly, his face almost trembling, “I would be caught dead before I allow
you to fall unjustly.”  He stood and nodded to Doctor Ming-Zhen, “Your resignation is forbidden.  You will lead our effort to fight these accusations, and we will fight them to the death.”  He straightened his shirt, “Tomorrow I will speak with some friends in the Party to see what might be done to assist us in this effort.”

Doctor Ming-Zhen stood and offered a quick
nod, “Thank you,
Xiàoz
hă
ng
.”

“You made an extraordinary discovery, and you deserve all possible credit for your honesty.  Any other would have buried it forever.  You have my utmost respect, sir.”

Doctor Ming-Zhen nodded again, “Thank you.”  Then he turned to leave, but Zhang called after him, “I will step down before I allow them to get rid of you.  You have my word on that.”

Ming-Zhen faced him, overcome with appreciation.  He swallowed a frog in his throat, unable to utter a response.

Zhang nodded with compassion, then, with a wave of his hand, said, “Now be gone.  You have work to do.”

Xiàoz
hă
ng
Zhang needed to do little persuading with his friends in the Party: Doctor Ming-Zhen's ambitions for Antarctica drew the government's immediate blessing and funding for the research flowed generously.  Any opportunity to save face in the debacle was welcome by everyone.

He was officially adopted as China's champion, the one to restore the nation's fortunes in science and best the nation's detractors.  He was featured prominently in all
government media, and a special space on the internet was established to follow his exploits, like a twenty-four hour reality TV series.