Chapter 4: Lilli

Cassie and Julie arrived at 8:30 am Monday morning, on the dot, Cassie eager to meet Eve, and both of them eager to start their new job.

She was already inside the meeting room, waiting for them both, all set up with her slim notebook and a projector.

The projector was displaying a picture of Johns Hopkins university.

"Cassie, Julie.

"Good morning, girls.

"This official part won't take very long."

Eve presented an NDA to each of them, and watched in silence as Cassie and Julie read every word.

They were both surprised at the strength of the language in the documents.

They were not allowed to talk about the nature of their work to anyone outside the company.

While they could use their research for their Ph.D. theses, they also had to give up all the intellectual property generated from their work, and would be required to vet all external disclosures with Eve before anything could be released to the public.

They would be working for TAUPAN, a company set up as a joint venture between Johns Hopkins University, Lennox Hospital, and the National University of Australia.

In truth, they soon realised that they were temporarily selling the use of their brains to Eve, so that she could exploit their skills, pillage their good ideas, and generally use them, for whatever purpose, at her leisure.

However, the money, and the opportunity to work with the black thread-worms, was impossible for either of them to resist.

Eve witnessed their signatures and transferred the forms to her briefcase.

"Thank you, Julie," Eve said, "Thank you, Cassie.

"My first presentation today will show you what you will officially be doing for TAUPAN, Pty. Ltd.

Julie thought, Strange choice of words, and exchanged a look with Cassie.

"As you know," Eve continued, "Johns Hopkins University has a very close relationship with Johns Hopkins Hospital.

"We have made great strides in recent years with a promising new treatment for cancer."

Eve showed several photographs, of generic-looking images of a hospital ward; doctors; nurses; pale, wan-looking women, and a room containing a machine, with an articulated arm, and an orange metal sphere on the end.

"This is our pride and joy. We call it a smart source, and it combines an autonomous ultrasound scanner with several directional gamma-ray sources. It is able to target tumours smaller than one millimetre in size, and hardly damages the surrounding tissue.

"We have commissioned a clinic with such a machine here, in Canberra, in the new Lennox Hospital, which has been built specifically for this purpose. We have full testing approval from your Therapeutic Goods Administration, and we have started to provide palliative care to terminal patients with inoperable tumours.

"I must say, the regulatory environment in Australia is vastly more amenable to experimental techniques than in the USA, where it can take years to get approval, even when treating terminal cases such as these.

"While we are not allowed to say that the new treatment is a cure, we are allowed to hope that we shall see remarkable results.

"Julie, you will be officially assisting Stefan develop image-processing software to find tumours with the Taubett instrument, to drive the gamma ray source.

"Cassie, you will officially be interviewing patients about their feelings about the treatment, and the comfort levels of the dosimetry."

The rest of the presentation was full of details, about radiation doses and the history of radiotherapy, but Cassie found it very boring.

She felt a little disappointed, actually. This wasn't what she expected to be doing at all.

Where were the worms?

As Eve came to the end of her presentation, her demeanour changed, becoming unusually serious.

She walked around the room closing the blinds. Finally, she closed the door, locked it with a key, and returned to her laptop.

"I apologise, girls. My first presentation was necessary, but it was merely a cover for the work we really want you to do, which I think you will find far more interesting, and far more rewarding. Stefan and his colleagues, in any case, are quite capable of doing the programming to interface your Taubett scanner to the gamma-ray source without any further assistance."

Eve entered a long password into her laptop, and a new presentation appeared on the screen.

The first image was of a large worm, grey with black stripes, oozed onto the side of a large Pyrex beaker.

"This, my girls, is your first image of Mary's worm.

Cassie's ears pricked up.

This was what she had come for.

Eve next showed a slide of a young woman, smiling at the camera, and dressed neatly in a cardigan and a skirt. She was a brunette, with long, straight, hair, and she stood relaxed and comfortable in herself. The fluffy angora of the cardigan showed her assets to good advantage.

Despite the dowdy clothes, Cassie thought she looked pretty hot.

"This is Mary." Eve said.

"Mary was the first human host of the black thread-worms in the latest outbreak in North America, six years ago.

"She was unlucky enough to be close by when the craft which brought them to Earth landed.

"Mary is now back living with her room-mate, Jasmine.

"She has been completely cured, and the worm you see here is dead.

"I have so much to show you today, but I have to emphasise that all of what you are about to see must remain confidential.

"Six years ago, the Earth was rapidly falling under the influence of an alien invader. Almost nobody knows, or at least believes, this fact, and we would like to keep it that way.

"Despite appearances, these aliens are possessed of astonishing intelligence. They are not a foe to be underestimated."

Eve put up a slide of a crash site. Initially, it looked like any horrendous aeroplane crash, with burnt wreckage strewn over blackened earth, but, as Cassie and Julie examined the details, they saw that the pieces of the craft were quite round, and compartmentalised, and like nothing they had seen on Earth before.

The craft had portholes, which looked very dark in the slide, but also seats which looked very much like those from the first-class compartment in an aeroplane.

"As you can see, there are several interesting details in this image."

A little sourly, she said, "Firstly, as you can see, the US air force can destroy a target with pinpoint precision. Who knows what we could have discovered if the craft was not pulverised shortly after it landed?

"Fortunately, the ruined ship was not totally wasted. Take note of the dark glass of the portholes. These are made of polymer glass. It was the investigation of the destroyed spacecraft which led to its fabrication on Earth, and it subsequent commercial success.

"Thirdly, note the seats. They have clearly been designed for passengers who are somewhat human in form.

"No bodies were recovered from the landing site, only dead worms.

"It is clear that there are still many mysteries surrounding the worm's latest invasion attempt.

"By accepting your role, you have already committed to keeping the nature of your work, and ours, a secret.

"Please try to learn all the details you can about the cancer radiotherapy treatment.

"There are those whose job it is to probe our research, and we do not want every Tom, Dick and Harry knowing the true nature of what we do. Some of our methods might seem controversial, or even dangerous, to those not in full possession of the facts."

Eve moved on to a slide showing a camp, much like the ones set up after Katrina, containing hundreds of FEMA trailers.

"After the invasion was halted," Eve said, "there were thousands of women who had been infected.

"It is only through the intervention of Johns Hopkins Hospital that their lives were spared, but the USA's security apparatus is capricious, and the final outcome is still uncertain. All of the women who were infected have been imprisoned in a camp outside Nevada, and their current prospects for release are slim.

"Please, Julie.

"Please, Cassie.

"Remember how important your silence is to us, and do not jump to any hasty conclusions. What I am to show you in the next few weeks might disturb you.

"We hold the lives of all of these women in trust. If any of us make the slightest mistake, their lives may be forfeit."

She showed three slides in quick succession, without lingering.

Each showed a scene of horror, dozens of bodies twisted in death.

"Remember Jonestown. Remember Waco. Remember Bhopal."

The screen now showed a table with a list of a dozen or so locations from around the world, and a date, and a number of fatalities. Most were in the dozens, but there were some in the hundreds, and one in the thousands.

Eve paused a little to let the ramifications of this table sink in.

"This is not the first time that the Earth has been attacked. Each time, the invaders get closer to their goal. If all we do is fight, and kill, and burn, then it has become clear that the worms will eventually prevail.

"It is time for an entirely new approach.

"If you have any concerns about your work, or ours, then I beg of you to come and see me before you consult anyone else, whether they are in the University, or the police, or the government.

"I am more committed, and more capable, than anyone else in Australia to manage the risk posed by the worms."

With a click, Eve moved onto the next slide.

A video started, obviously taken with a high definition camera, and it was hand-held, apparently taken through the window of a house.

It showed a pair of women, seemingly asleep, sitting beside each other on a couch and holding each other.

The camera zoomed in to their necks, and a skein of black threads could be seen, tangled together, and emerging from the collars of their blouses.

The black threads moved, very gently, as if they were part of some circulatory system.

"These women are completely controlled by the alien intelligence of the worms. These black threads are used for communication, and their victims are forced to join together at least once a day.

"Just imagine what those poor women are experiencing."

Eve caught Cassie's eye, and shook her head, just a little, but enough to prevent Cassie from bursting out with a comment.

The next video was taken in a department store, and showed a matronly woman looking at a rack of frilly cotton blouses in one corner of the store, then looking behind to attract the attention of a shop assistant.

One responded immediately. She was dark and willowy with long, black hair which hung to her waist, and moved quickly behind the customer, far too close for politeness.

Cassie and Julie didn't see it the first time, but Eve played it several times. A black whip-like thread appeared from beneath the assistant's denim skirt. It shot in directly under the customer's blouse, whereupon the assistant reached her arms around the customer to hold her up.

The reason for this became apparent when the customer's head tilted back, and she lost control of her legs, and she would have fallen to the floor were she were not held up.

The assistant led, almost dragged, the customer over to the change-rooms, where the camera could not follow. The time-stamp on the video skipped forward by ten minutes, and the two women reappeared, both happy and smiling.

"Many of the female customers of that shopping mall were captured in a similar way by the worms within a couple of days. Imagine the pain of being paralysed and captured in this way. Fortunately, this invasion was stemmed quickly, and it was possible to save all of the infected women.

"My kid sister, Lilli, was in that mall. She was infected by worms, and got out before the FBI moved in. She was on the run for weeks, travelling up and down the country. I have no idea how many others she infected, and nor does she.

"I'm proud to say that she's clean now, and has been for several years.

"You have to understand that we came very close to losing the Earth this time.

"There were two breakthroughs which halted the worms' progress, both of them discovered at Johns Hopkins university.

"Firstly, we discovered that the worms' anatomy is highly visible to a back-scatter X-ray machine at an energy of 250keV. Even when hidden behind clothes, or a handbag, a worm can easily be detected.

"The TSA soon began to provision such machines at every transit point in the USA, and later deployed thousands of mobile scanners for random inspections.

"Everyone has come to believe that these machines are an expensive and wasteful example of security theatre, and that all TSA agents are minimum-wage grunts with no useful skills.

"This idea is encouraged by the authorities, but it could not be farther from the truth.

"On the contrary, the widely-derided TSA program was the first initiative which was able to turn the tide against the worms."

The next slide was one of those standard back-scatter nudie-shots, showing an attractive female body standing with legs akimbo.

"Everyone knows that TSA agents are looking at images similar to these at every airport in the States.

"But sometimes they see an image like this."

The slide after that was similar, except that this woman had a bright, glowing blob attached to her back.

Cassie thought that the second image was far more beautiful than the first.

Continuing, Eve said,

"The new back-scatter X-ray machines are calibrated to 250keV, and can detect worms at a distance of ten metres. An estimated 99.9% of infected women were rounded up in little more than ten months after the introduction of the scanners.

"Some women managed to evade the scanners, but a highly-trained TSA agent can feel a worm even through thick clothes, no matter where it is attached on the body.

"Men were only utilised as carriers, and, in this wave of the invasion, men were not directly controlled by the worms.

"All the infected women were rounded up, as were all of the the men who had been identified as carriers, and sent to FEMA camps in Nevada

"The mass imprisonment of these people is still not common knowledge, and I am only privy to this fact owing to the importance of Johns Hopkins in stemming the invasion.

"Initial attempts to remove worms from the captured women were not very successful. Some of them were returned to society, and tailed. There were still many hidden sources of infection, and other infected women would deliberately target those who had been victims before."

Cassie again wanted to speak, and raised her hand, but Eve once again deflected a question with a small shake of her head.

"At a point six months after the invasion had commenced, Johns Hopkins University made a breakthrough. We found a way to both cure the infection, and also to prevent re-infection.

"We developed a vaccine which induces the human body to reject the worms.

"The existence of this vaccine has probably saved the lives of all the infected women who had already been captured."

Eve showed a video of a young woman in her hospital bed, tied to the bed with leather straps and cuffs. She was struggling and shouting. Two nurses held her down, while a third had to find a vein in her arm. The needle slid in, and the nursed depressed the plunger, slowly.

After the injection, the infected woman appeared to calm down, and became groggy, perhaps even lapsing into unconsciousness.

One of the nurses turned the insensate woman over, and shifted aside her hospital gown to reveal the worm attached to her back.

Eve skipped forward a few minutes, to a point where the worm began to squirm, as if something was irritating it, like a slug covered in salt.

With a final stretch, the worm lengthened, and dropped off the woman's back into the nurse's hand.

The nurse held it up, triumphantly.

It was quite dead.

"Johns Hopkins has engineered a vaccine against the worm. It directs the body's immune system to make antibodies, and the worm's fast metabolism, combined with its intimate connection to the patient's bloodstream, mean that these antibodies work with astonishing speed.

"The host's blood within the worm begins to clot within minutes of the injection, whereupon the worm withdraws all of its feeding tubes and nerve fibres from the victim. It soon dies with massive damage to its internal structure.

"Aside from killing the worm, the vaccine also grants immunity to the host, so they cannot be re-infected. We don't know how long this immunity lasts for, but we haven't yet had a single re-infection.

"Sadly, the vaccine is somewhat poisonous to uninfected women, and does not cause any useful immune response unless a worm is present. The reactive agent is concentrated by the worms, which allows strong doses to be used in infected women.

"Once the US government began to mass-produce the vaccine, the invasion collapsed. It was game-over for the worms.

"Julie, the true purpose of your program of research is to investigate the anatomy of women who have previously been infected. Your visualisations of tapeworm infections are impressive, and very informative. If one can reliably detect women who have previously been infected by worms, then governments around the world would breathe a little easier, and there would be a good case for releasing all the prisoners from the camps.