The Sapporo Outbreak Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  Title

  Prologue

  Chapter One - Seed

  Chapter Two - Incubation

  Chapter Three - Infection

  Chapter Four - Contamination

  Chapter Five - Outbreak

  Chapter Six - Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of my own limited imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  This book identifies product names and services known to be trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of their respective holders. They are used throughout this book in an editorial fashion only. In addition, terms suspected of being trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks have been appropriately capitalised, although I can't be completely sure about the accuracy of this information. Use of a term in this book should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark, registered trademark, or service mark. I am not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

  All contents copyright 2013 by Brian James Craighead. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author.

  First Edition, June 2013

  ISBN 978-0-9874632-0-3

  Copyright © 2013, Brian James Craighead

  Find out more at www.brianjamescraighead.com

  Brian James Craighead

  THE

  SAPPORO

  OUTBREAK

  www.brianjamescraighead.com

  By 2014, the extent of the US National Security Agency's PRISM system had been revealed. The NSA – and sister organisations such as the GCHQ in the United Kingdom – had covertly created a dragnet capturing the private calls, emails and internet traffic of almost every citizen in the western world.

  For many, the concept of personal privacy was gone.

  At the same time, the introduction of games involving artificially intelligent 'virtual' people and simulated worlds had become mainstream entertainment experiences. Games like Call of Duty, Halo and Grand Theft Auto were dwarfing the revenues from 'blockbuster' movies and television shows. Players in these games comfortably slipped into new worlds, meeting, trading, fighting and loving other real and artificially intelligent 'virtual' players.

  The rise of massive commercial social media operations such as Facebook pushed these games further into almost everyone's daily life. Games like Cityville and The Sims Social encouraged players to invite hundreds of friends and acquaintances into the game with just a single click. Thanks to advertising and in-game purchasing, the games developers could afford to give free versions of these games away and still generate massive revenues.

  A fun, compelling connected world, supercharged by social networks, promising experiences unlike anything before. All for the same price as two tickets to the movies. Who could resist?

  To investors around the world, these games were the new 'rivers of gold'. What followed was an explosion of well-funded new businesses developing products which dived ever deeper into the personal details of the individuals. And all that data was greedily gobbled up by endless rows of supercomputers hidden away in Utah's NSA data centre.

  The rise of a company like WhiteStar Corp - the creator of the multi-billion dollar series of immersive games - came as no surprise. ''WhiteStar', as the company is informally known, was involved in a series of "incidents" in December 2019 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a few months later. Drowned out by the social unrest breaking out throughout the developed world, the proceedings against WhiteStar drew little publicity. However certain parties involved were open to discussing the events, many of which transpired in WhiteStar's high-security steel and concrete complex nestled in a quiet residential suburb of Sapporo, Japan.

  Events that would lead to the greatest peacetime loss of life in human history.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Seed

  11pm Tuesday, Sapporo Japan (Minus 40 Hours)

  Rin Kobayashi pushed her chair back from her small, tidy desk, stood up and stretched. She could feel the tension in her back, her shoulders and - worst of all - her neck. This was her eighth night in a row, and she was exhausted. A deep-down, bone weary tiredness caused by a lack of sleep and the relentless monotony of the work.

  Kobayashi had moved from Tokyo 18 months earlier to study at Sapporo Medical University. Living with her retired grandmother in the suburbs of Sapporo, Kobayashi had found it difficult to make ends meet. Her parents helped as much as they could, but they had limited means. It simply wasn't enough to cover her studies.

  A year into her studies, concerned that she was becoming a burden to her elderly and increasingly fragile grandmother, Kobayashi met with the Dean of Medicine to inform him that she could no longer afford to continue studying. Alarmed at the thought of losing such an outstanding student, the Dean called in a few favours and less than two weeks later she had a job. Night shift triage nurse at Sapporo Tachibana Hospital, a small private medical centre in a quiet residential area near the university.

  For Kobayashi, it meant long days and long nights, but at least she could continue her studies and even help her grandmother out a little. She would be forever grateful to the Dean, and was determined to repay the faith he had shown in her by being a model professional.

  And so here she was - almost midnight and exhausted. All her paperwork complete. The last patient of the night - a drunk businessman who'd slipped on the ice and broken his arm - had been treated and discharged over an hour ago. Kobayashi glanced down at her phone and sighed. Still another three hours until she could go home for a few hours sleep, before starting another full day of studies at the university.

  Kobayashi stared out of her office window, into the dimly lit emergency entrance and the small visitor car park beyond. Thick snow deadened all sound while fat heavy snowflakes filled the freezing winter air.

  She had nothing to do.

  Just then, a faint blue eye winked at her through the darkness. And again. And again.

  Squinting her tired eyes into the darkness, Kobayashi watched as the large white maintenance truck crunched over the snow and pulled cautiously up to the emergency entrance. As it glided to a silent halt, she recognised the familiar "WhiteStar" logo splashed over the side of the van. A night shift paramedic pulled on a thick down coat and jogged out to the meet the vehicle.

  Tiredness replaced by curiosity, Kobayashi walked out of her office and into the main emergency room entrance. A blast of frosty air and a flurry of wet snowflakes announced the arrival of the paramedic. As the young man was wheeled in, bloodstained and moaning atop a long steel trolley, Kobayashi found herself momentarily distracted by the injured man's two companions. Expensively dressed and with the brisk air of busy executives, they seemed out of place. They belonged to the day, to the wood-panelled boardrooms of corporate Japan, not the cold impersonality of a hospital in the depths of the night.

  The woman was attractive. Petite, in her late-twenties, dressed expensively, she struck Kobayashi as a little self-conscious and extremely agitated. While as impeccably dressed as his companion, the man struck Kobayashi as very different. Calm, assured, he walked with a quiet muscularity, his black Armani suit straining to contain his energy.

  Kobayashi stepped forward to the harried woman while beginning a cursory examination of the man's injuries.

  "Hello, my name is Rin Kobayashi. I'm the triage nurse on duty. Can you tell me what happened to thi
s man?"

  The powerful man stood still and emotionless while the young woman blurted out "An accident. He was performing maintenance work in the lift well and got trapped in the lift gears."

  Kobayashi glanced at the woman, a little surprised by her tone. She didn't sound too concerned for the injured man moaning on the trolley. In fact, she seemed distant, as if his injuries were merely a distraction from more important things.

  "I see. You are from WhiteStar?"

  "Yes, from the Research and Network centre nearby. Can you tell me how long you will need to admit him?"

  Kobayashi heard the woman's reply in the distance, her attention drawn to the man's wounds. Deep stab wounds in his ribs, chest and neck. Lacerations - scratches - all over his face. One ear almost ripped off. His face ashen grey, anaemic from the blood loss. Blood pressure was plummeting, and his pulse was weak. Very weak.

  This man was dying.

  Kobayashi's nights of silence and paperwork were typically interrupted by broken bones, twisted knees, chest coughs and drunken misadventures. Injuries of this nature would normally be handled by one of the larger hospitals nearby.

  Without answering, Kobayashi turned to the paramedic. "Take him to triage 2, page the resident and have nurse Suni prep him."

  Turning back to the man's companions, Kobayashi said "This man's lost a lot of blood, and his injuries are very serious. I have paged the resident, but it seems clear to me that he will need to go into theatre. We are not equipped to handle this level of injury, and so we will treat him here and prepare to get him over to City Hospital. There's some details nurse Suni will need from you, but for now we must concentrate on the young man."

  #

  Nurse Suni wheeled the injured man into the triage room, and toward one of two examination tables. The room was pleasantly warm, the efficient underfloor central heating warming the polished concrete floor and holding back the brutal sub-zero Sapporo winter. A tied-back curtain divided both treatment tables. A dustbin lid-sized LED light hovered over the tables, held there by a solid white arm of steel. A semi-transparent computer screen sat on top of a steel trolley on wheel. A row of neatly arranged tubes, boxes and vaguely ominous steel instruments, packed neatly into trays were pressed against the back wall waiting patiently to be called into action.

  Moving the trolley alongside the first examination table, Nurse Suni slid a steel tray under the trolley mattress and with quiet efficiency transferred the injured man onto the examination table. As Suni adjusted the man's position on the table, the door swung open again, and a young man in a white lab coat bustled in.

  The young doctor flashed a tired smile at Kobayashi as he strode toward the examination table. Without a word he began examining the young man's injuries, muttering his observations into a small recording device in the breast pocket of his lab coat. As his urgent whispers drifted through the room, Kobayashi leaned forward to take a closer look at the man's wounds. Kobayashi had seen some gruesome injuries during her studies and her time at the medical centre, but nothing like this. Deep, parallel rips in the flesh exposed the wet red and seeping tissue underneath. The man's face looked as if it had been ripped apart. His nose crushed almost flat to his face, his teeth skewed, cracked or missing altogether. A finger-length tear on his left cheek had blood trickling from it. A strip of flesh folded back and lying on the side of his face revealed the inside of his cheek. The man's face was covered in blood, bubbles of blood frothing around his nose and mouth. Kobayashi couldn't tell whether the left eye was in its socket or gone altogether, although she could see through jet black blood-matted hair a gaping hole where the left ear should be.

  What sort of accident could have caused this?

  Breaking sharply from his examination, the doctor lent toward nurse Suni and relayed a stream of urgent instructions before returning to the patient. Suni hustled over to the row of medical equipment lined up on the far wall, turned to her left and grabbed a head-high steel pole on wheels with a clear bag of saline solution hanging from the top.

  Realising with a start that she had allowed her attention to drift, Kobayashi shook her head to clear her mind and got to work photographing the man's injuries in preparation for his transfer to the city's main hospital. The first flash of the camera seemed to startle the man back to partial consciousness, barely audible whispers bubbling up from his shredded lips. Bending forward, her ear almost pressed to what was left of the injured man's face, the coppery smell of blood in her nostrils and hot breath on her cheek, Kobayashi's eyes widened as she listened.

  "Onryō ... onryō ... onryō"

  She stumbled backward, dropping the camera onto the hard floor with a crash. The doctor glanced toward the noise then swivelled back to Suni, and in a controlled voice asked that she prepare the patient for an emergency transfer to Hokkaido University Hospital. Kobayashi watched as Suni slowly shook her head. The blizzard outside has become too violent. The man will have to be treated here until the worst of the storm passes.

  The doctor's reply was interrupted by a retching noise so loud it silenced the room. All eyes turned to the injured man, his head jerking unnaturally while he retched blood through his mouth and nose. The doctor grabbed the man and pulled him onto his left side while he convulsed violently - feet and arms flailing and catching the doctor painfully on the ribs.

  After a few violent seconds, the man inhaled sharply - the rattle of blood and saliva echoing around the room - and just as suddenly as it began the convulsion stopped. The man slumped back to the table, his body limp as he exhaled - a long steady blood-bubbled sigh. And then silence.

  Kobayashi looked on aghast at the scene unfolding in front of here. As the doctor and nurse frantically tried to revive the dead man, Kobayashi replayed in her mind the terrified whispers of a dying man.

  She recognized the whispered name. As a child, her grandmother would tell her stories of a monstrous pale disheveled ghost that would rise up from the dark seeking vengeance for past deeds.

  Stories of 'onryō'.

  What in the hell had happened to this man?

  #

  6am Tuesday, Palo Alto, California (Minus 40 Hours)

  Newly weds Ian and Sandra Brennan were doing well.

  Very well.

  The photogenic all-American couple was emerging as Silicon Valley's next 'power couple'. Smart, young and charismatic, they had quickly become wealthy through their work funding and by selling new technology startups to slightly older technology startups. Ian's MIT credentials and Sandra's Harvard-stamped financial pedigree were impressive, but it was their track record together that stood them apart.

  By the time they were 25, they were multi millionaires, building and selling the first of three successful startups. By 30, they had cemented their reputation as Palo Alto's new alchemists and life was good. Their biggest problem was finding the time to enjoy their success together, instead of apart in the boardrooms, planes and five-star hotels of the world.

  Which was why - on the rare occasions when they were both in town together - they'd start the morning with a dawn run around the beautiful Baylands nature preserve a few minutes from their multi-million dollar minimalist's dream. Fifteen miles of trails weaving through the 2,000 acres of undisturbed marshland in Palo Alto; the preserve was where they'd walked on their first date, where Ian had proposed six months ago and the site of their run this crisp winter morning.

  Ian and Sandra jogged wordlessly through the nature trail, their hot breath rising through the morning air. Despite Sandra being the stronger runner, Ian ran ahead with Sandra close behind. She would often tease Ian about his need to lead - and Ian would reply that with his young wife's sense of direction, he was worried their morning run would turn into a swim.

  Sandra could hear her husband up ahead as she navigated through some low hanging branches and into a leafy green opening. She loved this place. Birds gliding over the clear blue lake stretching into the distance, green vines rising up through the edge of the marsh.<
br />
  Sandra slowed to a stop and called out to her husband. "Hold on a minute." Ian stopped and turned back to his wife.

  "What's up?"

  "I'm always talking about this place to your mom, and I promised to send her a picture. To be honest, I think she wants proof that her son really does get up at 5:30."