The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [45]
“I don’t follow,” Smith confessed.
“You’re presumably familiar with the theoretical protocols of biological warfare,” Lisa said, although she was testing the limits of Smith’s ignorance, not making any such presumption. “Anyone planning an assault using pathogens as weapons needs to make sure not only that they can be efficiently delivered to the target and that they will then have the desired effect, but also that they won’t rebound. The aggressors need to immunize their own personnel against the spread of infection—but if they do that too openly, or too far in advance of the attack, they risk blowing their cover and attracting retaliation. Mass immunization programs are difficult to hide, and once the immunization has been implanted in everyone who needs to be defended, it’s out there in the world just waiting to be analyzed and synthesized by the intended objects of the aggression. I’m no expert in strategy, but I assume that tactical difficulties of this kind have been primarily responsible for the fact that the only confirmed uses of biological weaponry during the last twenty years have been intranational, either by terrorists like those lunatics who carried out the Eurostar attack or by political elites aiming bioweapons at their own troublesome underclasses.
“Like most biological-warfare research, antibody packaging has a certain amount of general medical significance, but the main reason people have remained interested in it is that it might provide a way to disguise defensive measures taken in advance of biological warfare. At its most elementary, the idea is that a domestic population can be clandestinely immunized against a bioweapon by secreting antibodies in a locally distributed product that wouldn’t normally be suspected as a carrier.”
“And beyond the elementary?” Smith prompted.
“In theory, at least, there are more subtle ways to tackle the problem. You could, for instance, use surreptitious vectors to import dormant genes capable of producing antibodies into tissue cells that normally have nothing to do with the immune system, but that could—if and when necessary—be activated by a switching mechanism broadly similar to those that already exist to determine which genes are expressed in which kinds of tissues. Effectively, it’s a calculatedly cumbersome system, which splits the process of infection resistance in two. No antibodies show up in advance of the bioweapon’s launch, but as soon as it’s launched, the launchers can distribute the trigger to their own personnel without it being obvious to any onlooker that it’s a defense mechanism.”
“Isn’t that overcomplicated?” Smith asked dubiously.
“Of course it is,” Lisa agreed. “That’s the whole point of biowarfare. Sneaky is best. But if I were planning World War Three, I probably wouldn’t approach the problem that way. I’d probably be looking at smart fibers and second skins. If I were on the Containment Commission, I’d be looking to issue the population with some very smart suits.” She was looking hard at him, trying to gauge his reaction, but he was spooky enough to have an efficient poker face.
“Morgan Miller was once an expert on retroviruses, I believe,” he said, abruptly changing tack.
“A long time ago,” Lisa agreed. “In the early years of the century, retroviruses were the vectors of choice for transforming animal eggs stripped from the ova of slaughtered livestock. Morgan’s search for an all-purpose transformer focused on that kind of carrier mechanism until 2010 or thereabouts, when anti-viral research moved into the next phase. Don’t be misled by the AIDS connection, though—not all retroviruses were bad news even back then. The ones Morgan worked with were constructive. I doubt that he bothered to keep library specimens in living mice, in Mouseworld or anywhere else, although he may have had a few frozen down and he’d have kept full sequence data for any novel types