Chapter 11
International Space Station, Low Earth Orbit
Somewhere over the North Pacific Ocean
Thursday
6:15 a.m. Pacific Time
Karl van der Schwab had been in and out of sleep most of his sleep cycle due to nausea from microgravity-induced motion sickness. The drugs his company had made for the very purpose were only partially helpful. The visually queued app that Marcus had designed for him only helped while he was awake and wearing the glasses. At least the drugs had made him drowsy—or maybe those were the other pills he had taken? He wasn’t sure. What he did know was that he was now floating free of his sleeping bag and there was a whirling frenzy of activity going on around him. In fact, there was so much happening he couldn’t decipher exactly what was happening. There were alarms sounding so loud that he felt his ears would burst. There were violent motions of the space station tossing him left and right. He flailed about wildly, trying to grab at some handhold nearby. Anything would do. But he was helplessly floating about and each time he thought he could grab something to stabilize himself, it moved away from him.
Bullets had ripped through the bulkhead behind him and he could hear precious air being evacuated into space. One of the European Space Agency astronauts was floating and flapping his arms and legs wildly in front of him. Another man floated nearby with blood squirting bright-red jets with each heartbeat between his fingers clasped tightly to his neck. The jet streams of blood sprayed out nearly a meter from him and formed hundreds of red spheres that continued on their vector paths across the compartment only to splatter against the sterile white of the space station interior, making amazing fractal patterns on the wall.
Karl pushed himself to the man and looked down at him. It was Dr. Raheem Fahid.
No! he thought. I need him!
“Dr. Fahid! Hold on. I’ll get help,” van der Schwab told him. The man’s eyes only showed fear and the fact that he knew the life was draining from him rapidly with each heartbeat spraying more of his life’s blood into the microgravity.
“Damnit! Too soon! I wasn’t ready yet!” Karl muttered to himself, only to be startled from a very loud clanging and then a kathunk! He finally managed to grasp a handhold and braced for more. He was at one of the computer stations nearest the path of flight direction porthole as what appeared to be the end of a very large spear or harpoon tore through the bulkhead across from him. The barbs of the protrusion extended and then it was pulled back through the hole it had just made until the barbs locked it into place. Karl felt the room shudder as if the entire wall would pull free. He held on for dear life. From somewhere else in the space station, he could hear more gunfire, or at least what he thought was gunfire and then…
“Goood morning, Dr. van der Schwab! It’s time to start your day.” The high-pitched cartoonish voice of the preset alarm on his data device was just loud enough to break him out of his nightmarish sleep state. It wasn’t really that much of a sleep state as it was a choke-back-puke-and-try-to-get-some-rest-between-drug-induced-nightmares state. But sometime about four in the morning either the motion sickness medicine had kicked in or his body finally adapted and he passed out from exhaustion.
Then the nightmares had started. He’d have to report that to his team of doctors, neuroscientists, and pharmacologists. It would be important to see if the motion sickness medicine was interacting with the dendritic protein monoclonal antibodies that he had been taking through a nasal spray. Karl went through the processes in his mind. He had designed the monoclonal antibodies to be wrapped in a dissolving nanosphere so they could penetrate the blood-brain barrier through the olfactory bulb. He had originally gotten the idea from the first-generation pandemic viruses.
Patients had often discussed a loss of taste and smell with COVID-19 and it had often been treated as just olfactory inflammation. But too many of his patients, friends, and colleagues had described an actual “blood and burned metal or plastic” smell in the place of things they used to smell. That had given Karl the idea that the virus was actually penetrating the blood-brain barrier and, in fact, COVID-19 viral particles had been found in spinal fluid and brain tissue. Somehow the virus particles were getting in the brain. Karl had hypothesized that it was through the nose where the olfactory epithelium led into the olfactory bulb. The bulb was in intimate contact with the brain physically, chemically, and biologically.
The motion sickness medicine did have some of the first generation–developed antihistamine diphenhydramine in it, which did penetrate the blood-brain barrier. Perhaps the antihistamine was interacting with the monoclonal antibodies and somehow in return stimulating some response in the brain causing the nightmares. Or, perhaps, it was just coincidence. Karl didn’t believe in coincidence.
“Good morning to you, Alvin. Sing me a song, please?” The song “Outlaw” by Alvin and the Chipmunks featuring Waylon Jennings suddenly filled his hotel room. Karl had long since a child been a fan of the animated creation of Ross Bagdasarian and actually had an original copy of the 1958 novelty record “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late).” The record was priceless now and stored in his vault at his main mansion in an undisclosed location. To Karl the song was beyond priceless the minute he had heard it as young boy. He got a kick out of yelling at his AI device as if he were the fictional David Seville that Bagdasarian played. In his best imitations, which were not good due to his heavy Austrian accent, he would sometimes yell, “Alvin!” Immediately the AI would respond with “Okay!” The little pleasures that wealth afforded him were clearly useless indulgences.
Karl liked those useless indulgences. They separated him from the non-player characters of the rest of the world. He was currently sleeping in what many in the press had considered pretty much the same, an expensive useless indulgence, the ISS. He and Talbot Davidson had followed in the footsteps of Robert Bigelow, but on a much larger scale, spent almost two billion dollars U.S. developing the Davidson-Schwab Inflatable Hotel Module for the ISS. They’d never make their money back via paying customers. But the DSIHM had other purposes that were going to pay off in a very big way someday—someday very soon.
He fumbled clumsily with the sleeping bag system that was attached to the wall, or floor, or bulkhead—he wasn’t sure what you called it—of his hotel room suite. He’d seen the brochures and the training manuals and there were fun spacey slash astronaut names for everything that would make the patrons of the future feel like they were getting their money’s worth. But Karl had known from the beginning that all of that was a façade for the real purpose of the DSIHM. He’d spent hundreds of hours with Talbot Davidson of Davidson Aerospace discussing the design and true purpose, but he was certain that Davidson never truly believed it would come to pass. But here Karl was in space, in the hotel, attached to the International Space Station.
Karl was in the “Executive Suite,” of which there was only one in the DSIHM. There were five other “rooms” but his was the most, well, indulgent. The Executive Suite was about three meters wide by four meters deep by two and a half meters high. The sleeping area had a king-sized sleeping bag that could be zipped into two compartments. At the end of the suite was a curtained-off area for the toilet and hygiene purposes. He reached into a pouch on his bag and pulled out his data glasses and his nasal spray. He took two sprays of the medication in each nostril before putting the white plastic bottle back in the bag. He sniffled briefly and then placed the glasses on. The tabs on the arms of the glasses made magnetic connection with the implants behind his ears and held the glasses firmly in place. The virtual screens lit up as the glasses began handshaking with his audio and neural implants. He started the motion sickness app. “Go ahead and pull up my schedule.”
“Yes, sir! Right away,” the simulacrum of the cartoon voice replied.
“Thank you, Alvin.” Karl fumbled with the motion sickness bags stuck beside his sleep station until he had them sealed properly in the disposal bags and put away in the garbage hamper.
“You are welcome.”
“Blech.” He turned his nose up at the smell coming from the barf bag as the disposal door schlurrped shut with a whoosh from the inwardly pulling air flow. He was certain that the odor, what little of it he had anyway, was probably not the actual smell. If he could detect it, he was certain that it must have been bad and probably smelled different to normal people. Ever since his latest round of treatments his senses of taste and smell were only a fraction of what they had been before that infection. And, atop that, the smells he did have for things were different than what he remembered. Bad odors were all now similar, as if the file for vomit, feces, wet dogs, smoke, and many others had been erased from his brain and replaced with the same default smell. He and Alvin had tried to come up with an algorithm to calculate or at least estimate the percentage of smells he’d lost. The best they’d come up with was around eighty percent with a twenty percent error bar. In other words, he estimated that his sense of smell was operating at about twenty percent.
He only wished his immune system was functioning at twenty percent. At least his company had managed to generate his current regimen of treatments based on previous generations of monoclonal antibodies and studies of previous pandemic viruses combined with cancer research he’d funded and HIV therapies that he held patents on. The cocktail of medicines he had required had kept him alive, but he wasn’t certain for how much longer that would last. But he had hopes—high hopes.
He pulled his daily pill container, cautiously removed the pack marked THURSDAY, and placed the contents in his mouth. He then chased them down with a swig of water from his squeeze-bulb water bottle. He did his best not to gag when another hint of the barf bag managed to make it to his brain. He continued to make mental notes when he smelled anything.
Actually, the eighty percent of things he used to be able to smell were like that unholy hybrid of blood and burned material, and this problem had erased one of his favorite useless indulgences—tasting wines, beers, and foods. Not only had his brain lost the information about what most things smelled like, it had also lost the ability to taste many things. The default taste was very similar to that default smell. Some things actually had no taste at all. Karl could literally drink from a ghost pepper sauce bottle with no sensation. Before his illness and treatments he could not even stand jalapenos. That was no longer an issue. He’d love to taste the burning sensation of capsaicin once again.
Even with all his money, he’d found no solution to that problem, or the fact that the treatments had basically left him with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. He took a small plastic atomizer of cinnamon essence and sprayed it in front of his face. Breathing it in gave him very faint hints of cinnamon candies he’d loved as a child—very faint.
Again, if he could smell it, it must have been very strong. He put the atomizer back in his pouch and suddenly realized he had a fairly bad bile taste in his mouth to go along with the “default” smell. Sometimes he wondered if the treatments had made the odor come from within him and he actually did smell that way or if it was, as he currently believed, a neurological disorder—a deletion of some of his source code. The doctors in the general public had no clue what caused the problem or how to solve it. But Karl did know what caused it. He’d been critical in developing it. And he was pretty certain he knew how to cure it. He hoped.
He didn’t like the taste he did have currently in his mouth, even though it was an actual taste, so he made his way toward his personal hygiene station and took care of some business there. He brushed his teeth and gargled with an antiseptic mouthwash as he’d trained to do on his previous suborbital flights. In prolonged microgravity it wasn’t as easy. But he managed. Besides, the microgravity made other things better, like the continuous pain in all of his major joints. Once he’d hit microgravity almost all of that pain was gone. He suspected a return to gravity would be extremely painful. He wasn’t looking forward to that part of the trip.
Alvin scrolled the calendar open in the virtual view display as Karl looked at himself in the tiny round mirror. He wondered briefly if he should worry with shaving. His salt-and-pepper stubble was just barely starting to show through with a day’s worth of growth. He decided to wait. He noted that his first order of business for the morning was to do a complete trek from one end of the International Space Station to the other. He had an hour and forty-five minutes set aside for that adventure. It shouldn’t take a tenth that, but Karl planned to be thorough and learn every little nook and cranny of the giant low-Earth-orbiting spaceship. Then he had an eating cycle followed by a scheduled appointment with Dr. Raheem Fahid, the noted virologist, astronaut, and creator of the longest self-assembling monoclonal protein crystals humanity had ever created. Had it not been for a previous version of those microgravity-grown miracles, Schwab wasn’t certain he’d have survived his last pandemic infection. He honestly wanted to pay the man his compliments for saving his life atop the other reasons he had for being there.
“Sir, you have an incoming encrypted audio message from Mr. Dorman.”
“Go ahead and play it.”
“Okay,” Alvin replied.
The glasses connected on a very close-proximity, low power–proprietary but Bluetooth-like protocol to the tiny implants just behind Karl’s ears, stimulating the bone and vibrating the eardrum to reproduce the audio information so that only he could hear it. The glasses did have an external speaker and could also connect to earbuds, but for true privacy Karl preferred the internal connection.
“Greetings, Karl. Hope you are feeling better this morning. Once you are up and about, let me know. We’re ready to pull the data feed for the photogrammetry survey of the ISS interior when you are ready to go. Can’t wait to compare it to the blueprints and ground model data we have. Also, let us know when you attach the backdoor transmitter to the ISS main systems processor. Our hacker friend is awaiting that signal. And, FYI, our contact at the Huntsville Operations Support Center has applied the software patch to the communications downlink and it is active…”