“Well, someone’s got to be recording what’s happening. That’s your job, isn’t it? You write reports about what people are doing and how they’re changing.”
After a few more moments of expectant silence I acknowledged that that was sort of my job, yes.
For the last four days, I’ve done a working day. I’ve gotten up at eight, spent some time in the garden sitting by Theodore’s grave—marked only with some bulbs I planted, too scared that he’ll be taken away if someone sees a cross—and then I start work at nine. I’ve been arranging my journals, the hundreds of pages of fear and uncertainty I’ve written since the start of this nightmare.
Soon I will go back to London. I need the internet to research and, more important, I’m about to run out of food. I brought lots of cans with me but I’m down to sweet corn and peas. I’m going to record this—all of this—because that’s what I’m trained to do and I don’t know what else I can do.
I can’t help in the fight for a vaccine, I have no medical or practical skills, I don’t have anyone left to care for. At the very least, I will record this event—the lives broken, lost and changed. I’ll collect stories and understand what on earth is happening and why. I don’t know what will happen. No one does. This could be the end of the human race entirely. I know that around 10 percent of men seem to be immune, but that’s not enough for humans to maintain a population. Without a cure, 10 percent of the world’s men can conceive 10 percent of the number of babies they previously did. Half of those babies will be girls. Only 10 percent of the 5 percent will be immune. The numbers don’t add up. This may be the end of all of us.
ELIZABETH
London, United Kingdom
Day 135
Amaya, thank you so much for coming in.” George greets Amaya warmly and she smiles and replies, “I didn’t have to walk far. It’s my pleasure.”
Dr. Amaya Sharvani, one of the country’s preeminent pediatric geneticists, called George a few days ago with news that has inspired hope, terror, anxiety and excitement. She has given us the key to crack part of the Plague’s code.
The three of us sit down in George’s warm, cozy office full of worn furniture and photos of his family.
“I take it from the warm welcome that you agree with my hypothesis,” Amaya says, her voice light.
“We’ve been working night and day since you got in touch and yes, we think you’re right.”
Amaya’s eyes widen and she leans back in her chair. “I’m not surprised—it made sense—but it means . . .” She trails off because it means that finding a vaccine is going to be unbelievably difficult. I’m fighting the delirium of exhaustion and disappointment. We’ve been working for months and there’s still such a long way to go. It’s March; the beginnings of spring are appearing and making fun of me as I trudge into the lab every morning at 7 a.m. and leave long after it is dark. I try to be cheerful and upbeat when I’m at work. I’m a shoulder to lean on, someone who can solve problems and use my knowledge to drive us forward, toward the goal of a vaccine. But on the way to work as I psyche myself up, and on the way home as I decompress, I suspect I look like the weight of the world is on my shoulders.
Identifying the vulnerability of men against the virus, and women’s protection from it, has taken so much longer than we anticipated, but Amaya has figured it out, thank God. Like many complicated things in science, the answer is ultimately relatively simple. We had so many theories. As we suspected, but couldn’t prove, it’s all in the genes. It feels like a miracle that Amaya has made this discovery and at the same time I’m so angry we didn’t figure it out ourselves. Over thousands of years the Y chromosome has lost most of its genes. The twenty-third pair of chromosomes in women is XX, and in men is XY. Y determines the forming of testes and production of sperm, but it doesn’t come as part of a matching pair. In paired chromosomes, like XX, with two copies, a mistake in one can be resolved by the correct gene sequence in the other. But when mistakes occur in the Y chromosome, it just disappears.