Vector

He took the corkscrew out of the girl’s skull, wiped it on his artist’s smock and went and opened a bottle of crappy plonk. He fancied getting well and truly rat-arsed and keeping up the whole serial killer shtick was very tiring. Ok, so he was a real serial killer, but it wasn’t the corpses that he was leaving littered around the streets of London that were the true targets of his murderous intent. Each body that he dropped off — each mutilated, clue-strewn carcass, which he had designed to lead nowhere in particular, was infected with something very special. He had been feeling that mankind had been needing a pandemic for a very long time and nothing that had reared its head as a possibility thus far had proven to be sufficiently virulent. He had been tinkering with this super virus for a long time, working to get it so that limited contact would spread it and still allow it to remain as damaging — it was a hard thing to balance.

He had been hacking hospital computers for three weeks now checking their records for unexplained illnesses which bore the hallmarks of his disease. He had named his creation Ceres for the goddess of the harvest — thus far he suspected her of reaping at least seventy people. There were mutations already abroad — he had built that into its design. It was beautiful. One of the wonderful things about the spread of the disease was that because of how it was being laid out there the first groups to be hit hardest were the police force and the morticians, so anyone who might have been able to work it out was passing away before they could put the pieces together. In a corpse the disease had a slightly different life cycle — as soon as it made the leap to a live specimen its life cycle was one of rapid evolution and explosive distribution.

It presented itself in the form of buboes, as a rhinovirus, and it could also house within the structure of other diseases — using the common streptococcus or the herpes simplex to transmit itself. he had used the engineering present in many things — antibodies, retroviruses, bacteria, single celled organisms, whatever had seemed useful — to create something that adapted to whatever situation it found itself in. it was a true chimera — a fusion of many ribonucleic strands that in the natural world ran like parallel lines. That was the mark of his genius — to make the impossibilities evaporate.

His serial killer name was ‘Hack the Tipper’ an awful pun that combined the fact he rode hackney carriages, tipped the drivers excessively, and that his kills resembled those of the legendary Whitechapel murders. It made him laugh. He had lunch with one of the journalists that wrote for the broadsheets and had a sideline producing opinion pieces for a science magazine. They were kicking around the idea of doing an interview on how science was reinvigorating itself by making technology into a lifestyle choice. he spiked the journalist with his already formulated inoculation against Ceres — he knew it would make the guy sick but then there was at least one person spreading a counter to the advance of the killer. Didn’t all serial killers need something chasing them? He gave Ceres its own opponent. He scrawled a caricature in his friend’s address book which he would duplicate in what he was now thinking of as the Tipper Letters.

He coughed and then smiled.