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  David looked at his subordinate and knew that this man’s children were going to miss him for the next few months, as he was going to be indisposed. “We just witnessed it here, Warren; that’s why we were running out to get you. We need a whole quarantine unit here. I say we still play this by the book, as we don’t know if these animals were the first in our state to be afflicted, thus this being the epicenter. Jack and I are going to voice record the incident that just happened while it’s still fresh in our minds. All I can tell you is that it happened so fast I almost missed it happening right in front of me, Warren. The animal in question went from seemingly no symptoms to major stress like behavior, then to falling over with seizures and death, all within a minute.”

  Neither Warren, nor anyone else in this world, had ever seen David Ho shaken. As a matter of fact, he had worked in Modesto for four years after transferring up from Southern California, and in all that time, David Ho had literally spoken to him only a handful of times, as David was not the chatty or open type. Warren had even mocked him to his family for having a stick up his ass. So it was quite unnerving to see the man so spooked that he became both chatty and open seemingly as fast as those pigs had died.

  Right then, Officer Nguyen walked up with his iPhone and handed it to David Ho. David started the video that was waiting to play. Apparently Officer Nguyen had had the presence of mind to pull out his phone and hit record during the pig dance. David watched with rapt attention, as Officer Nguyen was able to get most of the last half of the event.

  After they viewed the terrifying scene one more time, it was evident that the pig was in fact Mr. Tran’s pet because it seemed to be frantically trying to tell him something was wrong. David wondered if it hadn’t been running a fever. He had planned to send in Warren and Miguel to do a quick inspection of the pigs before they were through here, but they never made it that far and he sure wished he had that vital piece of information. Did they have a fever?

  Officer Nguyen sent the video to David and Jack’s phones as well, and then he asked them what they wanted him to do with Mr. Tran? It was decided that Tran would sit in jail until they made sure he wasn’t the source of this U.S. outbreak, because if he was, he would never see daylight again. He was no spring chicken and the sentence would be meted out in decades, not years.

  While they were talking, Miguel Garcia went back to the truck to order in the forensic team to their location. It was a call that could take hours to come to fruition, especially today, as he found out that Washington had already requested personnel from their office to be flown to Virginia immediately—which David now had to stop and keep in California.

  Miguel was hanging up the phone when they heard an obvious pig sound coming from the property to the left, across from Mr. Tran’s house. It was a stressed—injured or scared—squeal from a large hog. By the time Miguel brought his beanpole-like six foot three frame out of the truck, the others were already moving in on the house in question.

  It didn’t take long for them to learn what everyone on Earth was discovering; all the swine on the planet were dying. Even the ones in laboratories.

  By five that evening David Ho sat stunned in his office chair. The information could not be right, yet he knew it was, as he had witnessed it firsthand, here in his own backyard. Plus, he’d read about it happening in every corner on the planet. Forensic teams everywhere were working frantically to answer the question: why was every pig on Earth dead?

  * * *

  One of the things Karen couldn’t fathom until she arrived was the actual size of the Space Station itself. She knew the stats of course, who wouldn’t, but seeing was believing. Yet even then, it still took some getting used to, even though she was seeing it with her own eyes. In her mind, she thought that they would be housing the only long-term studies, but the reality was there were over one hundred units that could each house a different experiment, and over half of them were full. Business was booming in Space. All in all, if you counted the solar panels, the station was the size of a football field.

  She was currently in the gym with Flight Commander Oleg Vershinin who was waiting for his turn on the treadmill. In actuality, she was just a guest here, while Oleg and Expedition Commander Trofim Zardonov were the men in charge of everything except the experiments. Karen wasn’t an elitist nor snobbish in the slightest, but she found Oleg to be a bit of a bore and his English was nowhere near that of Dr. Dernov. After a week of trying, she just kind of gave up any effort to get to know the man better.

  It felt a little like high school and Oleg was not in the cool clique, and truthfully, neither was Commander Zardonov. Both were ex-military pilots and not scientists.

  Karen bid him farewell and exited the gym. She was heading to her private cabin to change when Anatoly caught her and asked her to come with him immediately. The American Government wanted to speak to her right away. She asked him what it was about, but he did not answer.

  Karen went into the control room more than a little freaked out, and when she put on her headset and found out with whom she was talking, she really freaked out. It was Frederick Winfield, the head of NASA. She spoke through the lump in her throat, “Yes, Sir, how can I help you?”

  “Karen, this is not going to be easy. Your shipmates have already heard this information from their respective governments earlier. This situation with the infected pigs went global. At this time, it appears that every pig on Earth has died.”

  Frederick let the repercussions of this sink in before continuing, “No one has a clue as to what is happening, and everyone is scrambling to be the first to know. We know you are a specialist in this field, so we will be sending you data to go over. We need as many minds on this as we can get. China is vehemently denying any wrongdoing, claiming that if it is a biological agent, then they were set up. Truthfully, we just don’t know at this point, Karen. We have no clue.”

  Karen hesitated, her instincts telling her that there was a lot more, “That’s not the only reason you called me, is it, Sir; you have something else to say?”

  A slight clearing of his voice revealed that he was tense, and that she was right. There was something else. Frederick continued, “We feel that this event might be related to your neck of the woods, that this event could actually be extraterrestrial in origin. Not that we have any evidence of that, but we are looking at everything—from planet alignment to possible spikes in Gama radiation. Which is where you come in. We need you to pour over the data you have and make sure it matches ours here on Earth. We are even looking at this as perhaps something that lay dormant in this species until some kind of cosmic trigger set it off. We just don’t know, Karen. This is truly an unprecedented event. We need you to become part of the solution, if that is at all possible.”

  She extricated herself from the call and faced her scientific counterparts asking, “What in the world is going on?”

  Anatoly answered first, “We were hoping you could tell us. I just got word from Moscow that the pigs that were housed in underground research facilities died as well. How can that be, Karen?”

  “NASA thinks it’s related to Space somehow. That maybe an ancient virus lived in the pigs and some cosmic event set it off and killed them all.”

  Harshal took that information in and warded it off, answering, “You might as well tell me that someone angered the God, Shiva. I am a man of science, Dr. Bascom, and that theory is just total nonsense to me.”

  Dr. Julien Grossen did not like that, and the blonde-haired, Swiss doctor immediately came to Karen’s defense before Anatoly could get there, “There is no need to be abrasive, Harshal, she was just relaying what others were thinking. Now let’s try to put our heads together, just in case the outlandish turns out to be the reality, as is often the case, is it not, Harshal? And, need I point out that their theory was a scientific one, not a magical one. It was just an astronomical guess, not outlandish, just extremely unlikely; yet a scenario we must cover.”

  Feeling the other two men in
the compartment were very unhappy with him, Harshal relented on his usual abrasive demeanor and conceded the point. Then he apologized to Karen. Once that was done, they started a scientific roundtable discussion of what they thought could be happening. After one hour of deliberating and then eliminating every theory that had come up, the four of them were right back where they started.

  One scientific fact or another shot down every single theory until they started to understand the kind of conjecture that must be happening down on Earth. The more they thought about it, the more science was making less and less sense. Every single person with a cognitive brain was waiting for reports from all over the world reporting what the cause of death was for these pigs.

  Karen could think of nothing else, for sure, and before she laughably tried to get some rest, she threw out one last thought straight from left field. It was right after Harshal had opened up enough to explain what supposedly happened when Shiva got mad. Harshal’s father might be a scientist, but his mother was a very religious woman and he understood the Hindu faith, so he understood what the deities could bring down on humanity. That story triggered something in Karen, even though it was four years off, she mentioned the Mayan calendar, and that stopped the room.

  Karen expanded that theory, “What if they knew ahead of time there would be a mass extinction? What if that was what they were trying to tell us? Maybe this is what was supposed to have happened in 2012.”

  It was Anatoly that got a hold of them with practicality, “Listen, we are people of science, and it may come down to this, to a place where we all have to get ourselves in line with God, but until we hear what actually killed those pigs, I do not want to hear about this being an act of God. Although the Mayan thing is a very interesting thought, Karen, it is dangerous thinking when men of science start framing scenarios without evidence. It is actually the kind of biased thinking that leads to missing the truth. So let’s let the facts come out and help if we can, but we cannot allow ourselves to believe that this was something preordained, or that this was caused by something other than one with a scientific explanation. Of course, once we find out what that explanation is, then we will chide ourselves for the deviation of our normal thought process.”

  Julien Grossen looked at Anatoly and understood what he was doing, but he was forgetting that they had vetted every known possibility in a very short time. Not only that, but they were all at the same intellectual level, so no one was being fooled into anything here. “Anatoly, I surely hope you are right, because science is failing me right now. We now know that some of the pigs that died in captivity were bred there and had never had any contact with the outside world. How can those pigs have died, Anatoly?”

  Of course, when one was dealing with the unknown, speculation takes over and becomes a new reality—the exact danger Anatoly had warned them against, and something that scientists should never do. They dispersed back to their chambers to rest and hopefully sleep. If one could sleep, then one might wake up to some answers.

  Anatoly liked to feel he was near the floor when he slept, so he had his sleeping bag strapped very close to the floor; he knew others like to sleep inverted, but that was not him. What surprised him was that sleep came very quickly. He just hoped to wake up with some answers.

  * * *

  Jack awoke to the same hateful sound he had endured since the age of five years old, the age when he started to have to be places. He looked at the clock. It was a Power Ranger clock, the same one that woke him on his first day of kindergarten. Although everything else in his room had been upgraded to a more adult version in high school, he had kept his clock.

  His office had calmed down a bit in the last week, but the world had not. Suddenly, pork was now the most scarce food on the planet. Jack read one story of a guy in Arkansas who had a deep freezer full of his private stock. That man, who had struggled for money his entire life, was now a multi-millionaire. The buying frenzy was out of hand, but his stock would soon all be gone. Only the super elite would ever taste pork again, and even if they did, only as long as the current supplies would allow.

  The biggest winners were the corporations with hog DNA stored in their data banks—and the ability to clone them. The Stock Market had already felt the huge bump in investors looking to get into those companies.

  Jack could hear the TV coming from the living room, and it was playing the Greek news channel, as usual. His parents both spoke fluent English—but not at home. At home it was their culture only, the way it should be, Jack mused, as he got up.

  He trundled to his bathroom with a chip on his shoulder; he was just not a morning person. He actually used to try to sleep in as long as he possibly could in high school, and he would try sleepwalking this small trek to the bathroom to have a few more precious moments of slumber. Sometimes things left in the hallway would be the cause of regretting that blind move.

  Nowadays he was doing better, but mostly because he got sleep, whereas in high school and college, he did not. Looking in the mirror, his blue eyes stared back at himself; his blonde hair, once so bright it almost shone white, was now turning a shade more akin to light brown. He brushed his teeth and used his electric razor to sharpen up. He ran the shower, and while he was waiting for the hot water, he had time to start thinking.

  Somehow he knew it would be so—that no C.O.D. (cause of death) would be found. The scientific world was at a loss, and in the deepest recesses of his fears, there lived the one where every pig in the world died and no one knew why. Ever since he saw Mr. Tran’s favorite pig do the desperate dance of impending death, he’d known. Like when a heavy smoker is taking a shower and finds a lump under their armpit, there was a stark reality that was coming, and like that smoker, Jack wished he could put the doctor visit off, but that would only make matters worse. To bury one’s head in the sand was to admit defeat, so mankind pressed on, looking for any possible thread to explain this phenomenon.

  He toweled off, dressed, and headed to the kitchen for breakfast. When he entered the hall, the customary waft of coffee aroma did not reach his nostrils, which was strange. The unusual continued, as his mom was not on the couch as she normally would have been, next to his dad in his recliner. Instead, his mom was standing in front of his dad, who was sitting in the recliner. She said something to Jack that made him not want to know what the television was discussing, yet he knew he must, “I don’t want you to go to work today.”

  Jack answered as he rounded on the TV, “Why not, Mom?”

  * * *

  Karen awoke with a jolt. It felt like someone docked with them, but she knew that was not the case, as they were not scheduled a re-supply ship for another three weeks. They were just past the halfway point in the mission and she was feeling great about her progress.

  Yesterday Anatoly had taken the lead in the major hunk battle between the two competing men. Karen would never confess it to anyone, but Space walking was not something she ever ambitioned to do; not only because it was the most obvious place for her to die, but also because of the dream she had recently experienced of floating off into Space after an accident untethered her. If she wanted to see the big blue marble, then the view from the Cupola module would do just fine.

  She had been exposing her frog sperm to open Space, as her experiment’s protocols called for, when suddenly the robotic arm malfunctioned. It was in danger of being a total loss, but without hesitation Anatoly got into a Russian Orlan Space Suit and retrieved her specimens, thus saving her experiment, and a whole lot of Japanese underwriter’s money.

  Anatoly was on a call in his private chambers at the moment, but she was picturing his young face. He and Julien were of the same age bracket, in their mid-thirties, but Anatoly looked easily ten years younger. Maybe it was Julien’s scruffy half-beard thing that was growing on his face, or the fact he needed glasses to see, but if she were to choose to procreate based on inherent family traits, she would choose Anatoly in a second, as the man obviously came from a superior gene pool
.

  Thinking of the Cupola module, she got a little homesick and decided to look at Earth for a while. Making her way to the module that many liken to the turret on the Millennium Falcon of the Star Wars movie fame, Karen was still thinking out Earth’s problems—as they all were. She was surprised to see Harshal staring out the portal, so lost in deep thought that he had the “thousand yard stare.” But when he turned, it was apparent that it was more than that; he had more bad news. “What is it, Harshal, what’s wrong?”

  He replied like he was in a trance, slow and distant, like he’d sent a lifeless, soulless entity to answer in his place, “My father called me. He wanted to be the first to call me, to assure me that he had already confirmed that it was true.”

  Karen did not do well with ambiguity, but he seemed truly in shock, so she sucked up what would have been her normal terse reply and found some compassion, “What is true, Harshal?”

  He looked at her and continued his trance-like speech, “Now the cows in India are all dying. Very rapidly, just like the pigs in China, and my father is very fearful of our neighbor’s response.”

  Karen fell back into the wall, stunned, “No, that can’t be, there has been too much time with no cases, plus for it to jump species in that order is not correct. Influenza was predictable; it would go to the fowl next. How is that possible, Harshal?”

  Karen realized that two things just happened in that exchange. One, she lost her composure in a way she hadn’t since she decided to become an astronaut, and two, she and Harshal just got real together, as there was no longer subterfuge in his body language, nor his words for that matter. The walls were down, and now they were going to have to work together like a real team should. There was no other choice for him, or any of them.

  For a change, he spoke to her like a colleague instead of a flunky, “Karen, it has happened. My father and the corporation he works for have stopped all productions and experiments and they are putting every mind they have to work on solving this. He is going to directly link us into their work and we are going to start to be part of the solution. He asked me to ask you to join us.”