The people I knew began to disappear.
A nurse from my mother's old hospital died. Then the doctor who had taught me infectious disease, then a researcher who had once shared an office with me. Then Lena. Her last message reached me at 4:12 in the morning.
I'm sick.
I stared at it. Another came.
Don't send anything.
And then:
Just tell me you're there.
I typed, I'm here. My finger hovered over the screen, and I do not know why, I will never know why, but I put the phone down, and the message stayed unsent. She died three days later. I learned it from someone else.
The origin was finally traced, not perfectly and not publicly, but enough. The earliest cases led back to the laboratory, to the containment incident, to my mother. To me. I read the report alone, three times. The strain that was spreading was not the one we had built. It carried changes that the investigators called consistent with selection under sustained treatment. The thing had been pressed from many sides, and it had learned. Everything it had learned, it had learned in a hospital bed on the floor below my laboratory, in the third week of my antidote. At the bottom of the page was a single line: The precise mechanism of initial transmission remains under investigation.
I laughed. Then I threw the tablet against the wall, and it broke. I stood looking at the pieces. After a while I sat down on the floor.
My mother had been right. Not about everything, not about the world, not about me. About one thing. Once it left our hands, we did not get to decide what it became.
And it had left our hands because I had signed a form, because I had wanted her alive more than I had wanted to listen to her, because I had once decided that what I could do mattered more than what I should.