Note: This is a science fiction novel about a deadly plague genetically engineered to wipe out humanity. It’s not for the squeamish.

She only really knew about the death thing because her father had decided to die a few decades ago. Ever the dramatist, he had decided he was “bored” with existing.

Before your systems would let you shut them down you had to undergo years of psychiatric testing to make sure you truly wanted to die and weren’t just suffering from a psychiatric disorder or software conflict.

Eventually the bureaucracy had told her father he could end his life.

He had gathered together all his family and friends to join him in his last moments.

Of course, over his 799 years he’d had a lot of children, grandchildren and descendants so the wake took a long time to organise.

Another complicating fact was that he was a Terran and wanted to die at home. Given that it is notoriously difficult to get a visa to visit Earth, arranging for more than a thousand people to visit the planet took much organisation – and bribery, to which the soon-to-be-grieving daughter had turned a blind eye.

Her father had loved Earth, despite leaving it when he was only 73 years old during the last Banishment. She had grown up listening to his enraptured memories of its peace and beauty. He glossed over the fact that the reason for its tranquility was that most humans were barred from ever visiting it. Her father could never shake off a yearning to return to humanity’s cradle – despite the fact that all the memories, pictures and holograms he revelled in caused him to feel the deep pain of the exile.

Eventually, she tired of his reminiscences and had avoided him for a couple of centuries in the hope that he would shut up about a world he could never visit again. In the end, the conversation that brought them back together had been the one about his funeral.

The moment she had set foot on the green blue planet, she understood. She had spent her life in cramped tunnels and small globes, creaking under the sucking strain of the endless vacuum outside. Suddenly she was surrounded by space. Not Space. But habitable, breathable space, stretching as far as the eye could see.

It made her gasp.

And when she gasped she tasted the pure natural air. It was only then that she realised how disgusting the air on Vulcan was, smelling of sulphur and methane as if it seeked to mimic the nearby planet Venus. But the air here on Earth was like a drug. Its freshness made her senses sing and her heart race.

And the weather. Of course, they had weather on space stations. Weather was just the action of the sun heating and cooling spinning volumes of air but here it was vast and uncontrolled and different. For a start, when it rained, which it did in all space stations, it didn’t feel like someone was peeing in your face. It washed you clean. The wind was not the tepid gusting of miles and miles of tubes but a vast, rushing entity that grabbed and tugged at your body.

Georgina loved it. For the first time in a long, long time she felt stimulated. The cocktail of sensations almost overwhelmed her.

Indeed, once she stepped outside the spaceport, the sensations were so intense she needed to sit down for 10 seconds or so. Others in her party needed to be hospitalised.

One week later, on a cold mountain in the northern hemisphere, at dawn, after a night of feasting, meditation and debate, the “cease” command was broadcast to Zamyatin senior’s nanotechnology. He was injected with a drug to simulate extreme aging. With his vast family clustered around him, some crying, some praying, some just trying to remember who he was, he lay back and waited for the end.

He looked so peaceful, so serene, lying in his coffin, clad in a white robe, clutching his Holy Book.

The he stopped looking serene began to look bored.

After ten minutes of waiting he got angry.

He couldn’t die – despite the best efforts of medical science and some of the more remote relatives.

* * * * * * *

“Right,” said the torturer, reviving her. “We’re ready. Your body is dying now. Dying quickly.

You’re effectively bound to it and there are no connections.”

Zamyatin was concerned. She had not been aware of losing consciousness. She had no idea how long her conscious self had been absent. Her strategy of simulating empowerment by focusing anger on her tormentor would have been hampered by that. Perhaps she was now bound to this expiring frame.

“Now you have a choice. The body you are in will die. But as we have already discussed it is not connected to anything. Your soul cannot be saved. You will die with it.”

“That. Is.

“…

“Not. Much…”

“…of a choice, yes I know. Let me finish. You have nowhere to taonload to … yet.

“I’ll open an escape route for you – a nice fat pipe leading to the public enquiries centre of the Justice Dept.

“But first I’ll give you this.”

Her vision swam with bold, bright, colourful numbers.

“Meet 101. You are now infected with the most lethal virus humanity has ever known. But don’t worry – I’ve programmed it so it won’t kill you until a series of conditions are met – and they’re a few months off yet.

“But you are very infectious. Do you see the choice I’m giving you? Flee down the pipe to live for a while longer and infect millions or stay here and die permanently in a great deal of pain.

“Isn’t it a delicious dilemma?”

Masks can’t smile. And torturers never do but she could sense something like that happening in his voice.

“Now I want you to take the escape route as it will wipe out your investigation team and hasten the spread of 101.

“To help you choose that I’m going to give you some valuable information that will help your inquiry. The gamble I’m taking is that it will be offset by the damage losing your whole team will do.”

At this stage all Zamyatin could do was grunt with what some part that was still her hoped was defiance.

“Of course, you’re in no state to receive information, let alone make life or death decisions, so let me do this.”

Through a curtain of blood and tears, she saw him prepare a syringe and inject its contents into a muscle somewhere in her upper body.

The pain went away completely.

She screamed as its absence brought home quite how much agony she had been in.

“Nanobots,” sniffed the torturer. “It’s pathetic how we have become dependent on them. But now I have your full attention let me emphasise that I will bring the pain back soon. But when I do you will be able to flee from it.

“It’ll feel like this.”

Sweet Creator! Pain. Beyond. Bearing. Agony. Agony. Ag.

When the torturer turned off the pain, Zamyatin vomited copiously. As she spat her airway clear, she fixed the mask with a stare: “I’m not afraid of death. And I’ll embrace it before I’ll help you. It doesn’t matter if I die, there are thousands of investigators like me who will hunt you down, and stop you.”

There was a chuckle. “It’s amazing how much defiance and bravery increase when the pain ends. Shall we see how you well you express your resolve if I give you a taste of the suffering?

“No. My mission is not to break you – though I did notice the way you flinched. My goal is to tempt you. You see, the information I offer will be invaluable in combatting the virus.

“You should know that it does matter if you die. Those thousands of other investigators are already dead. I designed the outbreak so there would be thousands of permutations of message. The previous one was: ‘The second letter of the first names of the Catering Overseer in the main detention facility of each affected settlement.’ I was quite proud of that one.

“Most led to instantly fatal (that means ‘making dead’) traps. Some led here. You are not the first to sit here and bleed. Sadly, none of your colleagues were as resilient or lucky as you. They all withstood the torture, but the virus took their lives away. It’s a little fickle.

“Let’s begin, shall we? You may not be in pain but you are still dying quickly and we have a lot of ground to cover.

“The first point is that what’s happening is – as you know – being caused by a virus. It’s a very clever one. I know, I wrote it.

“As I said, it’s called 101. It affects people, computers, machines and especially those nanobots that you’re all so fond of. It can do this because it’s very flexible: it works on any operating system, especially humanity. It’s spread by physical contact and electronic communication.

“It’s a vicious bug. When it erupts it mimics some of the worst plagues this species has ever endured: Black Death, Ebola, AIDS, Martian Lung Gout. If it infects a CPU it basically melts it.”

Zamyatin, still glorying in the absence of pain, felt strong enough to interrupt her captor: “Yes, yes, very clever. You must be very proud.”

The torturer’s blank mask looked at his feet. There was a low chuckle. “That’s not the clever bit. Of course, it was technically difficult to fuse all those different contagions of different systems and distil the mixture down to a kernel of a few simple rules able to create a universe of variables. It was even more tricky to target it so that different groups would suffer in different ways – some not at all.

“No, the really clever bit was coming up with the incubation process. That was clever.

“When you catch 101 there are no symptoms – bar one – for up to six months, during which time the carrier is ludicrously infectious.”

Zamyatin could not help but ask, feeling she was close to obtaining a key piece of information. “What is the one symptom?”

“It’s the very very clever bit. I can’t help but notice that you’re doing an awful lot more talking than you were. You probably think that’s because you’re not in pain anymore. That’s partly true but the main reason you want to talk is that 101 is making you chatty. Sociability – or its machine equivalents – is the first symptom.

“Do you see the beauty of it? A lethal plague spread by communication that lies dormant but contagious while it hosts communicates with as many people and machines as it possibly can.”

Zamyatin now knew why she could not help but ask questions. “You said some groups might not be affected. Which groups? Who?”

She didn’t really mean to vocalise a question that lay behind the others: “Will I die?”

“Yes, I’m afraid you will. You have about nine months. As for those who will survive, it will become obvious from my motives who they are. But there will not be many of them.”

The torturer paused. He turned and walk to the far end of the bare room. He opened a hidden door in the wall. He pulled out a small black box. He removed something from it.

Irrational concern gripped Zamyatin. What fresh horror was this. More torture devices? More viruses?

The torturer sipped from the cup. She smelled the sharp aroma of caffeine. And something else. Something unusual. It wasn’t just the smell of blood and other bodily fluids pooling round her feet. What was it?

“The shocking thing is that I had help,” he said as he wiped clean what looked like a can opener and stirred his drink with it. He looked at her. “Powerful help.” His voice changed subtly. “Powerful help from people who appreciate my work.”

Zamyatin stared at the mask, slowly remembering her abnormal psychology training. She had been taught that certain kinds of criminals were really seeking affirmation through their acts. They believed that important groups saw and approved of their crimes, thus validating them and making “special” the person committing them. It was all fantasy of course and the “powerful groups” quickly resolved into parental metaphors with treatment. Hope sprang within her: if the torturer’s fevered mind had generated a fiction of a powerful audience maybe the whole 101 thing was as unreal.

However, she then remembered why she was in this room. She was investigating the sudden deaths of millions of people.

The echoing silence of Vulcan was not a fantasy.