THE GENIUS

Bethesda, MD

20 hrs 4 min to Birth

A fierce manhunt for Gene had been underway for two hours and it was starting to get desperate. Gene was almost certain to miss the plane the rest of the Distributed Ops team was taking to Boston. And since he was included on teams to perform tasks that no one else could do, missing the plane sounded like bad, bad news.

Various cars were scouring the winding, lonely roads in the vicinity of his stately home in Bethesda. Gene had a daily custom of taking walks and thinking. But with no university campus, garden, or countryside at his disposal, he generally walked along the roads by his house.

The car that found him was the one waiting for him in his driveway, parked sideways, with the motor running.

He emerged from the darkness of pre-dawn, at the foot of the driveway to his house, at the end of a long walk. He continued briskly up the path and stepped into the beam cast by the headlights. He looked blindly toward the light.

He was tall and gangly, with generous hair. His round eyes, slightly big ears, and soft nose and mouth made him look almost like a monkey, or a geeky kid. Like a tall monkey from Ohio. But the glimmer in his eyes spoke volumes, and as soon as he started talking he radiated vitality, intelligence, and charm. The mischief that he showed in his eyes -- and occasionally flashed in big grins -- was the amusement of noticing new things all the time, and always being a step ahead of everyone else.

At this early morning hour, his face was tired, but concerned. He conveyed the exhaustion of being kept awake by troubling thoughts. He was holding an empty mug. He drank coffee or tea all day and night.

The car door opened and a pair of high heels clicked toward him in the light. The owner of the heels came into view: an attractive, sharply dressed brunette with designer eyeglasses.

Gene smiled and greeted her with a warm, lingering handshake. They had met once before. When greeting an acquaintance, Gene politely summarized what he knew about that person and what they had spoken about previously. He had a frightening memory.

They walked toward the car. The woman was a "greeter" from the National Security Agency. Gene was on retainer at the Agency. He had the distinction of being the most intelligent citizen of the United States, in the opinion of the Agency. For this reason, they had lured him away from a research position at a Big Name University with a unique offer. They gave him a large house in the vicinity of the capital, a generous salary, and a protected identity ("Gene" was codename for genius, not his real name). In return, they would call on him occasionally to assist in projects requiring special brainpower. The rest of his time was free to live a comfortable, contemplative life.

The greeters sent by the NSA were always young women. The objective was to fetch Gene expediently and to keep him entertained. Initially they had sent other fine intellects from more traditional positions within the Agency; but as it turned out, Gene frequently was in the mood to talk about a subject which his greeter had no knowledge of, and the conversations tended to languish or even become disagreeable. So the Agency tried sending sexy women who were good conversationalists.

"This time," she said by the car, "I have been given strict orders that we leave straight out of the driveway."

He looked at his wrist. He wasn't wearing a watch. "Right now? No time to pack?"

"I'm afraid not. You're needed urgently this time." She was trying to play it cool.

In fact, Gene could be temperamental, and it was not certain that he would get in the car. There had been problems in the past with getting him on certain projects he didn't think were worthwhile.

She held open the door, but he held his ground, wearing merely jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt. Apparently his brain kept him warm in the cool December night.

"What is it you have for me?" he asked. The answer to that question could decide whether he got in the car or went back inside his house.

"I have a Christmas present for you. We think we've found someone as smart as you are."

"Ooh. You won't take my house away, will you?" His tone was playful, but his expression was distracted.

"Not yet," she smiled. "They are sending you to meet this kid."

"Kid?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. His attention was half-piqued.

"Yes, a kid," she said, following her script. "The smartest person alive."

He frowned, but got into the car, as if forgetting that he had considered doing otherwise. As she sat down and closed the door, they suddenly seemed much closer to each other. She was wearing a skirt. The car shifted into motion. She uncrossed and crossed her legs.

"Yes," she said. "But sadly, I don't know anything more about it. You'll meet Distributed Ops up in Boston take it from there."

"Distributed Operations," he said, with a touch of theatrics. Looking out the black window, he appeared to be recalling everything he knew about the program.

"You'll have plenty of time to worry about that later," she said, touching his knee. "How was your walk?"

His face acquired a pained expression. "Troubling," he said sadly. "I've been thinking about the flu," he said.

"The flu?"

"Yes, the flu," he said, grimacing. "I know it sounds a little crazy, but I'm worried about the flu."

"Fascinating," she said, leaning in slightly. "What do you mean?"

He met her eyes, as if evaluating her trustworthiness. "We think of the flu as a mere cold," he began. "Sure, there is some threat. But with flu vaccinations, it's little more than the common cold to us.

"But the flu has an interesting past. At certain points in history, the flu -- or a grandfather of today's flu, you could say -- has caused a lot of damage. Have you heard of the Spanish flu?" he asked.

"I've heard of it," she nodded.

"It was only about a hundred years ago," he said. "About 20% of the world's population got the Spanish flu. If you got the flu, your chances of dying were about one in four, or one in five. It killed 25 million people in the first 25 weeks after it appeared. That's as many people as AIDS killed in the 80's and the 90's combined."

"Wow," she said.

"Wow is right," he said. "It blows my mind how little we think about this flu. When you hear the word 'flu,' you think of something that's a threat only to old people, right?"

"And babies."

"Right. Well the Spanish flu struck young, healthy adults. Not all flus are created the same."

"Interesting."

"Yes. Now consider this: what stopped the Spanish flu?"

He paused. She shrugged her shoulders good-naturedly.

"Nothing," he answered. "Nothing stopped it. It ran its course. Countries around the world tried to quarantine their populations. But it spread all around the world. What stopped it was itself. You see, every virus has an infectivity and a virulence. Much how every human has a height and a weight. The infectivity is how easily it spreads from person to person, and the virulence is how often it kills people."

She nodded.

"The Spanish flu," he said, "ran its course. If it had happened to be more infectious, it would have infected more than 20% of the world's population. If it had happened to be more virulent, it would have killed even more people."

"Scary."

"Now," he said, raising a long, thin finger, "if the Spanish flu appeared today in America -- and America was where it originally appeared -- what do you think would happen?"

She bit her lip. "I have no idea. Could we use modern medicine?"

"You'd think so, right? But no, actually. Modern medicine wouldn't get us anywhere," he said. "Modern medicine doesn't have a cure for viruses. Just as it doesn't have a cure for the AIDS virus, or even the common cold. But unlike AIDS, the Spanish flu would move quickly if it appeared on the planet today. As it did before, it would make about 20% of the world's population sick. So in the United States, some 60 million people would get sick. And one in four of them would die. So 15 million people would die, in the United States alone."

"But even without a cure, don't we have better response measures than a hundred years ago?" she asked, wide-eyed.

"Response measures? Sure. But you know what? With increased travel today, and greater population density, there are factors that could increase the spread of the flu. Like the first time, we wouldn't be able to stop the flu very well at all. The truth is that we are hardly any better prepared for a major flu than we were a hundred years ago."

She turned her head a little sideways. "So you're afraid the Spanish flu is going to come back?"

"Not the same flu," Gene said. "The next big flu. Another flu with that kind of infectivity and virulence is coming someday. One with more severe infectivity and virulence is coming. It's merely a matter of time until we get a worse virus. The clock is ticking."

"But how do you know?"

He turned to her. His eyes were big, round pools of passion. "From the laws of mutation. It's inevitable," he said. "Given the nature of mutation. And the span of time."

"You don't think," she said, "that we might defend ourselves with science?" She had reached a point, as most of his greeters did, where she wasn't sure if she was conversing out of professional obligation, interest in what he was saying, or personal attraction to him.

"Viruses are always changing. As we learn to fight them better, new ones appear. It's a race between the viruses and us. Viruses mutate and become different and stronger. We have to respond with new defenses. People talk about a supervirus -- an unusually resistant virus. Such a virus is bound to appear sooner or later."

He looked out the window. "Humans are overconfident and short-sighted by nature. We forget that our existence is fragile. What will it be like when the next supervirus comes? Two-thirds of the world will be killed. Or more. It would not be impossible that a virus could kill us all. With a strong enough virus, it could happen in weeks. Poof. The only people left would be tribes on islands. People in the middle of Australia. We would go the way of the dinosaurs." He raised both eyebrows. "You've heard of the Neanderthals. Do you know they were a different species from humans, and they had the ability to talk? There was an apelike species on this planet before we were, a species that could talk, which went extinct. We aren't even the first ones here."

She nodded. He had become passionate about what he was saying. He has gorgeous eyes, she thought.

"I know it sounds crazy," he murmured. "We're more interested in the problems that we ourselves cause, not a supervirus. No one will believe the threat until it has arrived and it's killing us all. The only question is when the next supervirus will appear. Fifty years? Ten years?"

"It doesn't sound crazy to me," she offered. She envisioned him living all alone in that big house because he was so smart and important, and the idea was so enticing to her that she felt a strong urge to jump him right there in the car.

He smiled, knowing that conversational skills were a part of her job description. His thoughts had floated back to the first thing she had said to him, about the kid. The smartest person alive? Nobody can do those puzzles faster than I can. Definitely not a kid.