Paris

Takeda, the rejuvenated virologist, was amused by his tete-a-tete in the digital world with President Emilio Sanchez. During Takeda's long coma, it appeared the President had attained unparalleled notoriety. Days of watching the news in downtown Paris cafes convinced him he was the only human who missed Emilio's meteoritic rise to stardom. Aside from unhealthy eating habits, Emilio appeared like the perfect man. Having him around to save the world was more than fortuitous; given the other powers that be in the world today, it seemed orchestrated. Marilyn was the invisible puppet master pulling the man's strings.

Takeda smiled. Last night, for the first time since he awoke from his torpor, he felt the need to use the credits gifted to him by Nick Schmidbauer, the Chairman of the Visconti. The evil ghost, once perhaps the scariest man alive, was obviously outmatched by the formidable duo of Emilio Sanchez and Electoral. Nick's days were obviously numbered; that was reassuring as the biologist decided how to move ahead with his latest plan. The kind words of the digital goddess were reassuring. He felt he knew what she had meant by her desire to reconnect.

The doorbell of the Starbucks store rang as he pushed open the glass door. In Paris, life transpired along its ordinary course, irrespective of the doom and gloom on the screens. In his heart, Takeda himself felt calm. If the young girl's brain waves were powerful enough to change behavior on earth, something big was on the horizon. To Takeda, it was the strangeness of the story which had prevented widespread fear and panic from taking hold over humanity. When told of a nearby bomb ready to explode, most people could fathom the threat and fear, but if that same person warned four flaming horsemen of the apocalypse were galloping across the cosmos, few could react. They simply lacked the imagination and contextual framework required to trigger their more primal instincts. Some things were just too distant, strange, or nonsensical to feel real.

He was the coffee shop's first morning client. As he walked in, the cashier looked up, saw his colorful drag outfit and smiled back. The barista liked his outfit; Takeda blushed. If the digital creature was to be believed, Nick's plan was part of a convergence of dramatic events designed to obfuscate the genuine solution to the problem facing Sophie. Nick's request for a deadly virus was one of many awful doomsday scenarios lined up for this Attraction. In effect, Marilyn had used Nick, and probably others, as an elaborate smokescreen to obscure, or at least distract the populace from the true threat. While he never spoke to Sophie, he wholeheartedly felt she was exceptional in many ways. Saving the earth might just be one of her gifts.

How could he be part of this larger story? He was nothing more than a cross-dressing centenarian in a smoking hot younger body. His new plan was indeed strange; he was about to complicate things beyond reason and reinforce the computer's theories. He smiled at the barista and placed a large order. The God Bias existed; a universal draw which subtly altered random events to favor outcomes favorable to mankind. A virus was nothing more than a small living thing designed to mutate and reproduce. If the Bias was real, with some effort, a virus could mutate for the good of man. Better yet, a virus could force human DNA to mutate to its own benefit. The idea was, in Takeda's not-so-humble opinion, genius. The computer confirmed he was on the right path.

Then there was the aliens. On mars stood a creature claiming to be billions of years old. Takeda didn't buy that; immortality was a myth. One life was enough for anyone, and after a hundred years on earth, he knew nothing could summon the will care for much longer. The creature called Liam spoke normally, which made no sense to him. No mind could live that long without falling into some type of madness. Then again, he was a virologist, not a xenobiologist.

Moments later, as he walked out with four coffees, breaking news hit the screens: -- CEO of Blackberry Kidnapped by couple of Siamese Prostitutes. -- He giggles struggling not to drop the tray. There was chaos on the screens.

The President had wasted no time. The headline was music to the virologist's ears. CNN showed footage from a street security camera. The images were from a Berlin nightclub. At four in the morning, as the ghost and his security detail walked out of a long stretch limo, Nick appeared to make his way to two women holding hands, waiting for him before entering the bar. One woman grabbed Nick's feeble neck in a choke hold as the other opened fire, shooting both guards like a pro. Moments later, the girls forced Nick back into the limousine, and it quietly drove away. In today's Information Age, no one ever got away unless that was the desired outcome, and that kind of outcome required a certain degree of power to arrange.

The President was behind the kidnapping; kudos to him.

Pawns were moving on this large chess board.

He hoped Nick was hurt, or better yet, was being tortured.

Then Takeda saw his own reflection in a mirror. The red of his lipstick shocked against his short brown hair. He looked wonderful. He could he not be thankful enough to the ghost for such a perverted gift. What Nick imagined would infuriate Takeda had instead served to exhilarate him. His veins were buzzing with sexual energy; it made him feel so alive.

He wondered if this meant his virus was no longer needed. There was a chance, now that Nick was out of the equation, that the time in his hidden lab was truly his. He could create his little gift to mankind in peace and without threat. This strange nexus of events had given him an idea. What if he used his skills to change the world in a positive way? With some luck, maybe he could save it from the alien invasion. He had a devious plan few could understand.

Takeda was ready to teach mankind to respect once again biology. He had a brilliant idea, and if his plan worked, he alone had the skill to reshuffle the deck and make sure the party on November 21, what they called the Sixth Attraction would be even more epic than even the computer might guess. As he looked up in the sky, striding down the avenue, he took a deep breath of the cold air fall air. The sunrise was deep orange over the Paris buildings. He loved walking in his new high heels. His pedicure was fresh, and his toenails were cute as buttons.

Decades ago, he engineered and gave Nick a bug that changed society. His creation stayed in the news until this Electoral game finally took over the spotlight. After a cursory overview of the recent developments on Mars, it seemed like the disciplines of physics, mathematics and computer sciences were stealing the show. A lesson regarding the power of biology was in order. Takeda would place biology back at the center of the debate, where it needed to be. The man needed to invent what he wanted to be baptized as the God Virus. The idea excited him.

On his way to the lab, he saw one of the billboards on the side of the road. It was an ad for yogurt. To Takeda, yogurts were living collectives of bacteria. He sauntered to the lab in the small streets, balancing the tray of coffee. In the sauna, away from Nick's goons, he'd read about the God Bias. The applications of this strange concept to biology were limitless, and it even seemed like it had never been used to create an evolving virus. He would create a virus designed to harness the new invisible power of God himself.

The God Bias was simple. In plain words, if a person's life depended on the flip of a coin, and one was flipped a thousand times, perhaps 502 times out of 1000, slightly above the statistical average, the flip would allow the person to live if that was the Universe's desire for her. So if a single flip took place, the bias was almost impossible to detect but if the person's life depended on a greater than average draw and 1000 flips were done, then the bias systematically would save the person.

Viruses were notoriously unstable and capable of changing themselves without much effort. A virus made to mutate upon each cycle of reproduction was highly dangerous unless these changes benefitted the host. He needed a virus, designed to change within a host so many times that the God Bias would kick in to transform the virus like the coin saved a person in the example used by most. If the universe wanted a person to die, the virus would mutate into a violent form. If a person needed to be saved, the virus would save lives.

He walked alone on the Parisian sidewalk.

There were signs of the game everywhere. Watching them, it seemed like Emilio and Marilyn, the once mortal enemies, had now joined forces against the evil that was the Visconti. Takeda smiled and took another deep breath of the cold morning air; he was excited for the first time in quite a long time.

It was a rainy fall morning in Paris. No one but the sanitation workers and bakers were up. The street cleaners, brooms in hand, turned valves on street corners and used water to broom away last night's debris. The bright colors of Takeda's outfit clashed against the old stones. He was a sight for sore eyes; a rose roving amongst concrete and weeds.

The bag on his shoulder was the most expensive money could buy. The ghost's credit cards worked well, but now that the man was gone, he would no longer use them. Along with his four coffees, Takeda carried a small bag filled with drugs he'd purchased from the local pharmacy the night before. Takeda arrived half an hour later at the door of his lab on Lalande Street. He punched a code, and the door buzzed open. He used his shoulder to push the large wooden door. Takeda's hormones were slowly morphing this body into a much slimmer bulk. What he was losing in strength, he was happily gaining in elegance.

He stepped over the door’s heavy metal frame. There was no security personnel, just silence. Once inside, he looked into a two-way mirror. The retinal scan worked, and the elevator doors opened. He made his way down, deep below the ground to the secret lab.

Before the young centenarian locked himself inside for a week, he took care of one last thing. In his bag were new colorful and tight clothes. He had to spend time in isolation, and while the seclusion and darkness were tolerable, spending days in the same outfit was not. He spread the outfits on the entry table. He inspected the lace and shiny couture and smiled. He now had the perfect body for them. He pulled out two pairs of high heel shoes from the bag and placed them next to the dresses.

Takeda knew the cocktail of chemicals flowing in through his veins was getting out of control. He had to keep his mind focused on the task at hand. Some of the compounds floating in his blood had to be neutralized, at least temporarily. The sexual energy was good, but the constant onslaught was distracting as hell. God, he loved biology. A couple milligrams of hormones could transform his virile old self into this proud young queen. He had to lower the libido long enough to create the virus. Self-medication was never an easy decision to a cell biologist, but he popped in a pill from the bag.

As it quickly took effect, Takeda saw in his mind the biological transfer of molecules from the pill into his system. He imagined the pill dissolve in his stomach's gastric acid. The sip of coffee splash on it and the water molecules helped carry the heavy metal to the receptors to bend the hormone tips. He often wished he could shrink himself to a molecular level to witness such events.

After a couple of minutes, the virologist opened his eyes. He felt colder. The man was back in charge. He was ashamed to pharmacologically tinker with his new self; he loved his sexy persona way too much. Once done in the lab, he was letting his hormones overwhelm him once again. He caressed the soft tissue of his skirt. For the moment, the sexual energy was silenced and replaced by a drive and desire to invent.

The lab was a marvel of technology. Everything a virologist needed was here. It was a cavern of shiny stainless steel. He grabbed a white lab coat from a drawer and partly covered himself, but out of respect for his new self, he kept his lab coat open to see a sliver of color. He had created the META virus with the purpose of extending human life; he would create a new virus with an entirely new purpose. It was to empower the God Bias to do what it must to its host. He took another sip of the first latte and began his work.

For the weapon to work, he needed it to be a small virus capable of reproducing quickly, mutating each time it did. But older versions of the virus, less "evolved" versions, had to die in the process as well.

Takeda walked to a whiteboard, grabbed a pen and unclipped it. He smelled the tip. The methane compound connected with his nose's receptors. In his head, he saw the entire sequence of effects leading to the endorphin being released in his brain by receptors. Virology was a number's game. The God Bias was a bias between 0.1% and 0.4%. With each thousand mutations, 501 to 504 would favor the host while 499 to 496 would not. Takeda walked over to the desk and reached out to start the computer before quickly realizing this would open a window to the digital world. He shut down the machine immediately. There was no reason to give Marilyn, or anyone else, a hint of what he was trying to achieve.

He went back to the whiteboard. Natural selection needed a minimum of ten thousand successive mutations. Mutations in life were rare and mild. Natural selection used hostility in the environment to select desired traits to weed out the weak. Instead of natural selection, he would use the God Bias and the laws of probability. He needed bold and robust mutations; in turn, that meant an unstable one.

If the virus could mutate each time it reproduced, this would reduce the number of generations needed. To alter the host, the virus needed time to move to a cell, enter its wall and force DNA replication. This copy of itself took a long time. Once the mutated virus reproduced, it would need to travel to a different cell. Multiple mutations within the same cell were out of the question; the host cell had to survive. He paced for hours, thinking.

His first true obstacle was time. Even the fastest acting virus in nature took minutes to multiply. The cold virus, the Rhinovirus, took days, not minutes to incapacitate. Even viruses which were open strain viral agents like Ebola took their sweet time to infect a host. This virus had to stay somewhat dormant, mutate, evolve using the favorable randomizing effect of the God Bias.

Takeda spoke to himself, "Even with a bias of 0.4%, I need a million cycles to have a chance for this baby to work." He grabbed a pen and drew on the board. The numbers simply did not add up. A day had less than two thousand minutes, to get the needed mutation in a single day, the replication rate had to be a fraction of a second. He circled "0.23 seconds/cycle." If the bug reproduced four times each second, it had a chance to evolve into the needed protection in a matter of days. The Sixth Attraction was a month away, and the virus had to spread across the world.

This quick reproductive speed was impossible for any virus. Nothing in blood moved that fast. A virus was a carbon-based shell covering a portion of code. The code had to enter a cell, merge into a longer strain of DNA or RNA and trick the cell to work on its behalf. Back in the Vienna hospital, he had been given a kicker shot. The stimulants forced a cell to work about twice as fast, not a thousand times faster.

Takeda paced in the lab. The math was simple, the virus had to cycle and reproduce over a hundred times each minute, which was biologically impossible. There also was a question of size. A virus reproduced with some DNA or RNA and millions of dead viruses required way too much matter and damaged a host. He continued pacing. The idea was impossible.

Then it struck him. He remembered the yogurt ad. Humans were a walking depository of bacteria. The intestinal tract alone had over five hundred types of bacteria, and the rapid reproduction of these foreign cells formed the majority of the fecal matter. Man literally expelled millions of useless bacterium each day. The digestive tract was a miniature lab immune to the gas and heat produced by the splitting bacteria.

Controlling and speeding bacterial multiplication would be much simpler than working on a virus. The first way to speed bacterial fission was to alter the chemistry; cell migration was hindered by lack of liquid. That wasn't enough. One bacteria always split in half and formed two. As long as half the cells died before splitting again, he could control the growth.

Takeda was excited. He wrote on the blackboard "1200 seconds." The average cellular fission of bacterium took twenty minutes or over a thousand seconds. The number contrasted to the needed value of 0.23 second per cycle. How could he speed up any biological process? Bacteria reproduced and split much faster than virii, but he still needed much more speed. The delay in chemistry was always due to the assembly of atoms and molecules inside of an aqueous medium. The same way a drop of wine in a glass of water needed time to diffuse, any biological process required time to work.

He once toyed with a novel concept. To speed up the assembly of a large puzzle, cheaters used patches of pieces already assembled. He could do the same with his invention. Since a bacteria split in two as it multiplied, he needed to kill half the bacteria to keep it from multiplying. Why not have one side of the splitting pair duo steal the other side? That way, his creation would be a necrobaterium. He looked into using saline concentrations to pry the bacteria open.

The idea of a zombie bacteria went against nature and shocked his admittedly warped sense of morality. But time was too short to place ethical limitations on himself. Some bacteria were already eating flesh; this was nothing worse. He felt there was great danger in any living organism evolving in a closed loop. It reminded him of the digital creature, the one called Electoral, evolving by itself in the memory of a computer. Throwing caution to the wind, he continued with the work.

At first, his efforts were laborious. After many failed attempts, he found a solution. One of the two cells had to explode past a point of recognition by the adjacent cell. After a day, he changed the bacteria where it now took only a minute to reproduce. He crossed the number 1200 on the board and penciled in 60. He was still far from the value, which remained at four times per second, but any advance of such magnitude needed to be acknowledged. Then he realized, the cell segregation phase could be sped up. Normally, one cell in the shape of a bubble transformed into a larger bubble before it closed at its middle, forming two cells.

He changed the genetic code which generated the outer shell to force it to create a tube. Closing a straw at its center was simpler and required less time. At this stage, one more analogy came to him. A boat moving extremely fast over a body of water did not need its backside to stay afloat. Because the boat moved over water, its own speed pushed water away from the opening on the backside. His bacteria were reproducing faster than any cell had ever had. Maybe, between reproductive cycles, the evolving cell did not need to reclose fully.

Takeda removed from the DNA the portions which controlled what is called the Cleavage Furrow. He watched under the microscope what happened next. The cell ate the neighbor, inflated and then bent upon itself like a rounded donut. As if it were a serpent eating its own tail, it began to reproduce and digest itself in an endless cycle. Each time, the DNA was opened and copied. Watching under the microscope, he saw the strains of DNA, like guitar strings, vibrate under the stress of the cell's endless appetite. Takeda was awash in amazement. The stress of reproduction damaged the strains and created multiple mutations in the process. He had resolved two problems at once.

The reproduction speed of the rounded cell was closer to a second. These donut shape cells were, at first, very unstable. If they consumed at a faster rate, they digested themselves into oblivion, and if they reproduced too slowly, they broke open. They needed a bath of nutrients to stay alive, and Takeda knew nothing this stable in the human body existed.

One night, he felt like he was wasting his time. These small bacterial rings were incredible, but they were nothing more than the first step of the invention of his God Virus. Like a captain of a boat lost in the Atlantic Ocean, he needed to trust himself. He let the ring eat itself for about an hour. With time, as if by miracle, it mutated into a more stable form. The God Bias was definitely working in his favor to help this primitive form of life survive. He could not believe his own eyes. Before long, he had a stable culture of these rounded bacteria cells. The rings would pause their endless reproduction when nutrients were absent and resume with plasma. This was a good start.

The next obstacle one was the transfer of DNA from the necrobacteria to the organism in which it was found. The strange mutated bacteria did not have the power to hook itself into human DNA. Bacteria was an independent organism, unlike a virus, which was mostly parasitic. For the God Virus to work, he needed a way for a virus to steal the evolved DNA of the bacteria and then push the code back into a human cell. The theft had to happen after a couple of hours of the bacteria working. The most famous DNA author known was the HIV's virus's RNA script.

He was an expert on the timing of processes in a cell. His Meta virus disabled a cell's natural clock with severe repercussions to the human host. It infiltrated every cell and broke open the looped strain. He needed something a bit different. The tool of choice was probability. To get an occurrence happen after a million seconds, he only had to make it a rare and improbable. Sure, in some cases the DNA transfer would be premature, but once again, he needed to trust the God Bias. It would make sure things happened in the right sequence.

As a virologist, he had his answer rather quickly. He merged virus strains. The first was a T4 bacteriophage, a virus capable of infecting a bacteria. The second was a mixture of the Rhinovirus, his Meta virus, and HIV. The resulting virus was too strong; he needed to tone it down. He looked at all the viruses in the refrigerator and then he saw it. It almost was calling him: the plantar wart virus. It could stay stable for years as a parasite to the human body. Its growth was controlled. He needed a parasite bacteria, growing in the digestive track with RNA script capacity.

After one more day, the cocktail was finally ready for testing. It was an ugly opaque brown liquid. He'd run out of coffee and new dresses to wear, but testing could begin. He sat for a minute, and was unable to stay awake.

Only an expert in his field could know and understand the sheer brilliance or a higher form of intelligence.