APPENDIX

THE SCIENCE OF THE

WILD CARD VIRUS:

Excerpts from the Literature

...fearful beyond imagining, worse in many ways than what we saw in Belsen. Nine out of ten affected by this unknown pathogen die horribly. No treatment helps. The survivors aren't a lot more lucky Nine out of ten of them are somehow

transformed, by a process I can't even begin to understand, into something the—sometimes not even remotely human. I've seen men turn into effigies of galvanized rubber, children sprouting extra heads . . . I can't go on. And what's worst is, they're still alive. Still alive, Mac. Strangest of all, maybe, are the ten percent of survivors, the one-in-a-hundred of those who actually contract the sickness. They don't show any outward signs of change, mostly.

But they have—I have to call them powers. They can do things a normal human can't. I've seen a man soaring into the sky like a V-2, looping the loop and returning to land lightly on his feet. A berserk patient tearing a heavy steel gurney apart as if it were tissue paper. Not ten minutes ago a woman walked

through the wall of the little office of this onetime warehouse where I've shut myself away for a few minutes' respite. A naked woman, gorgeous, a real pinup type, glowing with a rosy light that seemed to come from inside her body, smiling a fixed glassy smile. I'm not cracking up, Mac. I haven't gone round the bend into madness or morphine. Not yet. Even if I'm lucky to get an hour or two of sleep a night—and then the horror fills my dreams, so I'm almost glad to crawl out of my cot and face the reality of what's happened here. These things are happening, they're real. You may read about it yourself someday, if the brass don't succeed in clamping the lid down. I don't see how they can—this is Manhattan, for Christ's sake, and the victims number tens of thousands.

Thank God it's not catching. Thank God for that. As far as we can see, it only develops in those directly exposed to the dust or whatever it was—and not in all of them, or we'd have a million more. As it is, quarantine is impossible, even adequate sanitation. We've had an outbreak of influenza in our wards, expecting typhus any hour . . .

They say some kind of aliens are behind it all, men from outer space. Given what we've all seen, that doesn't sound farfetched. I've heard it noised around at the highest levels that they've even caught one. I hope it's true. Then they can stick the bastard in the docket with the Nazi bosses at Nuremberg, and hang him like the animal he is. . . .

—personal letter from Captain Kevin McCarthy,

United States Army Medical Corps,

September 21, 1946

Accounts of the incident make it clear that the vessel containing xenovirus Takis-A exploded at an altitude of 30,000 feet, well within the so-called jet stream. In its dormant state the virus is encased in a durable protein sheath, the "spores" so often and incorrectly referred to in the lay press, which experiment has shown to be resistant to extremes of temperature and pressure such as to permit its survival under natural conditions from several hundred feet beneath the ocean to the upper limits of the stratosphere. Vira! particles were borne eastward across the Atlantic on the jet stream, washing out at random intervals by droplets of rain, or settling naturally; the precise mechanisms still await demonstration or observation. This accounts for the mid-Atlantic Queen Mary tragedy (September 17, 1946), as well as the subsequent outbreaks in England and on the Continent. (Note: Rumors persist of a large-scale outbreak in the U.S.S.R., but Premier Khrushchev's regime continues to maintain a silence as absolute as its predecessors on the matter).

Wind and ocean currents provided short-term dispersal ofAppendix 401

the virus over a substantial area of the eastern United States (map 1). More alarming by far have been subsequent irruptions of the virus, in spite of the fact that it does not appear to be infectious, widely distributed across both time and geographic distance. In 1946 alone there were over a score of outbreaks reported, and almost a hundred isolated eases, extending clear across the United States and southern Canada (map 2).

The location of the majority of major international outbreaks provides a clue as to a possible pattern: Rio de Janeiro (1947), Mombasa (1948), Port Said (1948), Hong Kong (1949), Auckland (1950), to name a few of the most notorious—all major seaports. The problem was how to account for appearances of the virus, generally in isolated incidents, in locations as far from the sea as the Peruvian Andes and the remote uplands of Nepal.

As our investigation reveals, the answer clearly lies in the durability of the protein coat. The virus can be carried by any means, human, mechanical, animal, or natural, and survives indefinitely unless exposed to destructive agents such as fire or corrosive chemicals. The majority of North American outbreaks, and the relatively large occurrences in seaports have been persuasively traced (McCarthy, Report to the Surgeon General, 1951) to items awaiting shipment in the docks and warehouses of the affected district of Manhattan. Others have been attributed to the precipitation of viral particles onto vessels and vehicles in transit. Individuals, even birds and animals (who are never affected), can carry the particles on their person without knowing it. The Nepalese outbreak referred to above, for example, was traced to a naik of the Gurung clan, whose regiment, the King's Gurkha Rifles, was involved in attempting to contain the ghastly communal violence of August 10-13 in Calcutta, India, in which the Hindu and Muslim communities blamed one another for an outbreak of the virus, with a resulting loss of life estimated at twenty-five thousand; the Gurkha corporal himself never developed the disease.

... how many deposits of dormant virus remain, dusted across rooftops, gathered in sediment in rivers and sewers, lying in deposits in the soil, still borne aloft on the jet stream, cannot be determined. How serious a threat it still poses to the public health is still equally inascertainable. In this context the

inability of the virus to affect the vast majority of the populace should be borne in mind. . . .

—Goldberg and Hoyne, "The Wild Card Virus: Persistence and Dispersal," Problems in Modern Biochemistry, Schinner, Paek, and Ozawa, eds.

The ability of the wild card virus to alter its host's genetic programming resembles that of terrestrial herpesviruses. It is however much more comprehensive, altering DNA throughout the host's body, rather than affecting and being expressed in a certain location—e.g., the lips or genitalia—as are the herpes family.

We know now that xenovirus Takis-A affects a larger percentage of an exposed population than originally assumed—perhaps as much as one-half of one percent. In many cases the virus merely appends its own code to the host DNA; this is the dormant form, in which the virus has no objective existence, but exists only in the form of information—another trait it shares with the herpesform viruses. It may remain passive and undetected indefinitely, or some trauma or stress to the host may cause it to express itself, generally with shattering results. Amounting as it does to "reprogramming" of the host's genetic code, the virus (in either active or passive form) is truly inheritable, like blue eyes or curly hair.

Apparently anticipating its predominantly lethal effects, the Takisian scientists who created the virus designed it to perpetuate itself as, in effect, a recessive "wild card gene." Recessive, because a dominant gene that produced lethal mutations in ninety percent of offspring and rendered another nine percent either unable or unlikely to reproduce would survive only a few generations, even if, as is estimated, thirty percent of all those with xenovirus-modified DNA carry the dormant form.

The wild card therefore follows the conventional rules of inheritance for recessive traits. Only in cases where both parents carry the viral code does any possibility of producing an affected offspring exist; even then the chance is only one in four, versus a fifty percent chance of producing a carrier with

no chance of expressing the virus, and another one-in-four chance of an offspring who does not carry the code. . .

—Marcus A. Meadows, Genetics, January 1974, pp. 231-244

Despite the Red-baiting paranoia of the late 1940s and early 1950s and the "findings" of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, aces fared no better behind the Iron Curtain than in this country, and in fact considerably worse. The party line was laid down by Trofim D. Lysenko, semiliterate maven of Stalinist science, that the supposedly alien "wild card" was merely a mask for diabolica! bourgeois capitalist-imperialist experimentation. In Korea, captured Americans were made to sign confessions of germ warfare in an apparent attempt to account for the outbreak of the virus that swept that nation, North and South, in 1951. Meanwhile, anyone showing signs of metahuman talents within the Soviet sphere simply disappeared, some to forced-labor camps, others to labs—and no few to shallow graves.

With Stalin's death in 1953 came a minor relaxation. Khrushchev acknowledged the existence of aces, and they began to "enjoy" the status they had in the U.S.—i.e., they had the privilege of serving in the military or GPU (later KGB), or vanishing into the Gulag Archipelago. As the 1960s passed, strictures against them relaxed, if not to the extent that they did in the United States, and state-sponsored superheroes were permitted to become media personalities, like cosmonauts and Olympic stars.

Why the initial rejection of blatant reality? The Brezhnev/ Kosygin regime admitted in 1971 that Lysenko was a joker, in whom the virus was expressed as hideous disfigurement; the existence of aces was a persona! affront to the former farmer. As to why Stalin went along with the anti-ace campaign, the rampant paranoia of the dictator's later years in particular is generally considered sufficient explanation. However, several highly placed defectors of the late 1960s and early 1970s repeated the rumor that Comrade Nikita sometimes, late at night in his cups with boon companions, boasted that he himself had slain the former dictator with his own hand in the cellar of the Lubyanka Prison—driving a stake through his heart. . . .

—J. Neil Wilson, "Back in the U.S.S.R.," Reason, March 1977

Xenovirus Takis-A, colloquially called wild card, was an experimental organic device developed by the Ilkazam, a leading family among the Psi Lords of Takis. Written into its DNA is a program that reads the genetic code of the host organism and modifies that code in order to enhance the host's innate propensities and characteristics. Such an optimization gratifies as never before the great Takisian drive to cultivate personal (and by extension familial) virtu. Takisians already possess potent mental powers; by means of wild card the Ilkazam sought to bring forth a multiplicity of wild talents in its members, ensuring its preeminence for many years to come.

The challenge the Ilkazam researchers faced was to produce a program that would identify and enhance desirable characteristics; no one wants to be a better hemophiliac. Biochemical individuality among Takisians, however, is even more marked than in humans, who are one of the most biochemically diverse species on Terra. To develop software capable of discerning favorable characteristics—an "intelligent" program—and enhancing them, and which could be implemented in the viral DNA, required experimentation on an extravagant scale. Given the nature of Takisian society there were always plenty of subjects available for even the most drastic experimentation, Takisians as a whole not having many hangups about insisting the subjects volunteer. However, even Takis lacked a sufficiently large supply of criminals and vanquished political enemies—not a distinction commonly drawn in that culture—to provide the sort of experimental base needed to fully develop such a complex tool. Fortunately, from the Takisian point of view, a pool of creatures of astonishingly similar genetic makeup presented itself . . . earth.

. . . Most wild card enhancements aren't favorable to survival, or are survival traits taken to lethal lengths, such as keying the adrenaline fight-or-flight system so high that the slightest stress forces the victim into overdrive, burning him out in a single burst of terminal speed-trip frenzy. Nine out of ten survivors had undesirable characteristics enhanced, or desirable ones enhanced in undesirable ways. The "joker" takes forms ranging from the hideous through the painful to the pathetic or merely inconvenient. A victim might be reduced to a formless blob of mucus like the familiar Joker-town resident Snotman, or might be transformed into a partia! animal likeness like tavern-keeper Ernie the Lizard. He might acquire a power that in other circumstances would make him an ace, such as the limited but uncontrollable levitation of the Floater. The manifestation may be quite minor, like the mass of tentacles that form the right hand of Joker's Wilde, Jokertown's decadent poet laureate.

In certain cases the distinction between classifications is blurred, as in the aforementioned Ernie, whose slightly greater-than-human strength and the protection offered by his scaly hide are insufficient to make him a true ace. Another, more horrific example is the tragic Burning Woman incident of the late 1970s, in which the virus affected a young woman by causing her body to burn with an inextinguishable flame, but to regenerate itself even as her flesh was consumed. The victim begged passersby to kil! her, and finally died in Jokertown's Blythe van Renssaeler Memoria! Clinic, apparently as a result of euthanasia—a resulting indictment against Dr. Tachyon was quashed. Whether her card qualified as joker or black queen cannot be determined.

Because it is designed to interact with its host's individual code, no two expressions of wild card are alike. Moreover, its behavior differs from subject to subject. . . .

. . . That as many as ten percent of those who contracted the virus survived its effects is a tribute to the skill of Takisian genetic software and hardware artistes. For a first large-scale test, among a subject population different from that for which it was originally designed, the release of the virus on Terra was a tremendous success which would greatly have pleased its creators, had they learned of its outcome.

Earth, on the other hand, had a different point of view.

—Sara Morgenstern, "Blues for Jokertown: Forty Years of Wild Cards," Rolling Stone, September 16, 1986

Excerpts from the Minutes of

the American Metabiological

Society Conference on

Metahuman Abilities

(Clarion Hotel, Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 14-17, 1987)

Talk presented March 16, 1987, by Dr. Sharon Pao K'ang-sh'i of the Harvard University Department of Metabiophysics.

Gentlepersons of the Society I thank you. I shall come directly to the point. Research by our team at Harvard indicates that metahuman abilities, the colloquially called "superpowers" engendered by the Takisian wild card virus, are exclusively of psychic origin, and in all but rare cases are exercised through the instrumentality of psi.

(Session called to order by Chairperson Ozawa.)

I understand that my preceding statement might be considered a rhetorical excess of the kind perpetrated by certain of my predecessors, which caused the still-fledgling field of metabiophysics to be considered a pseudoscience of the caliber of numerology and astrology by a number of serious scientists. Yet honesty, and the press of empirical evidence, compel me to reiterate: metahuman abilities are specialized forms of psychic power.

We now have a better idea of just what wild card did to its victims. In so-called ace cases the virus appears to have acted first by enhancing innate psychic ability, which gave direction to the overall progress of the gene-code rewrite. This explains the high degrees of correspondence between the personalities and proclivities of known aces and their metahuman abilities—why, for example, devoted pilots such as Black Eagle acquired powers including that of flight, why the obsessed "avenger of the night" Black Shadow has such control over darkness, why the reclusive Aquarius presents a half-human, half-delfin

appearance and can in fact transform himself into a sort of super-Tursiops . A microscale telekinesis appears to be one of the mechanisms by which wild card effects its changes, enabling the subject subconsciously to choose, or at least influence, the nature of the transformation she or he undergoes.

I understand the enormity of the implication that people might, in some sense, have "chosen" to draw a joker or black queen. Speculation in that direction is, however, beyond the scope of our present researches.

One of the great puzzles of the post-wild card epoch has been precisely how the alien virus, however advanced the technology that produced it, was able to give certain individuals the ability to violate well-established natural laws, such as conservation of mass and energy, the square-cube law, the inviolability of the speed of light itself. At the time the virus was unleashed, science was inalterably hostile to the existence even of psychic powers—justifiably, given the lack of compelling experimenta! corroboration for such phenomena. It has now been compelled to accept people being able to project fire and lightning, to transform themselves into animals, to fly, or to contrive mechanical appliances that enabled them to do these and similar things in flagrant disregard for principles of mechanics and engineering.

Of course, even by 1946 clues were available in the theoretical reaches of quantum physics. In fact, then-modern technology, up to and including nuclear weapons and the fusion devices in the process of development, was largely based upon quantum mechanics, much of the work being done on the basis of "we know it works, but we don't know how." Given the impetus of the reality of wild card, psi powers were quickly given a quantum mechanical rationale; "action over distance" without apparent recourse to the strong, electroweak, or gravitic forces being a feature, for example, of the curious interconnectedness of particles that have interacted, postulated by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen in their famous "paradox," and established with some finality by the Aspect experiment in France in 1982. . . .

. . . A fairly obvious instance of TK-based power is shape changing. The subject--in almost all cases subconsciously—rearranges her or his component atoms to produce a gross structure that differs considerably from the original: for example, Elephant Girl's rather unsettling transformation into

a flying Elephas maximus in apparent violation of the mass-energy conservation principle. At least in the case of Elephant Girl, this is explained by subconscious TK on the subatomic level; Ms. O'Reilly can apparently summon into being a cloud of virtual particles and maintain them in existence immensely longer than they would normally exist. (A discussion of virtual particles is, of course, likewise beyond the scope of this presentation. I refer the interested to articles concerning, for example, the particles that "carry" the strong interaction, and that for an infinitesimal instant violate the conservation principle.) As part of restoring herself to her original appearance, Ms. O'Reilly permits the virtual particles that made up the "phantom" mass to lapse into nonexistence.

It was Elephant Girl's ability to fly in defiance of all known aeronautical principles that sparked the line of inquiry leading to the conclusions expressed in this paper. Simply put, Elephant Girl's, Peregrine's, and all known aces' flight or levitation is simply a variation on TK. In this sense, the Great and Powerful Turtle is the archetypal flying ace, in that he acknowledgedly flies by means of his telekinetic ability. But no trick of physics would permit Elephant Girl's ears or even Peregrine's magnificent wings to uphold even a small human in flight, to say nothing of a full-grown Asiatic elephant. They, like the Turtle, fly through use of mind power alone. . . .

. . Energy projections provide another thorny problem simply explained by—again—TK. Jumpin' Jack Flash appears to project blasts of flame from the palms of his hands, and moreover can manipulate the fire he produces in remarkable ways. But this individual does not actually project the flame, in the sense that it is not emitted from his own body; in point of fact, it isn't strictly speaking flame. His TK enables him to regulate the Brownian motion of the circumambient air. He creates a "hot spot" of highly excited particles approximately one micron from the flesh of his palm, and then uses TK to direct the resultant stream of incandescent gas.

. . . Superluminal-flight powers present a special case. In most cases (and it's beneficial to keep in mind that each wild card transformation is unique) the individual with the capacity for light-speed or faster-than-light travel has the ability to emulate a single photon, or tachyon in the latter instance, becoming a "macrophoton" or "rnacrotachyon" in a manner similar to the "macroatom" devices University of Sussex researchers under Terry Clark, which can emulate the behavior of a single boson. The spaceships that conveyed the wild card virus to this planet, as well as the humanoid alien known as Dr. Tachyon, employed the samq principle for their superlumina! drive—which led to the coining of the word by which the only earth resident not born on this planet is known to this day.

Faster-than-light travel has proven of only limited utility to aces to date, owing to limits of duration and the problems of navigation over long distances, so far insuperable to our technology. Or so we infer from the fact that no ace has ever journeyed beyond the limits of the solar system (present orbit of Neptune) and returned. . . .

. . . A salient feature of the so-called "gadgets"—antigravity belts, dimensional portals, armored suits—is the fact that none of them can be replicated. On disassembly and examination they're often found to make no mechanica! or electrical sense. Each is a nonreproducible result. This explains why some enterprising gadget-master hasn't marketed, say, a personal light-speed flying belt, or an antigravity forklift. Only the creator could make one that would work. In some cases, the components consist of ludicrous assemblages of debris, up to and including apple cores, hairpins, and the torsos of Barbie dolls. Others consist ()ply of a diagram of a circuit, which, like the chimerical Hieronymus machine, work as an actua! circuit "should."

The explanation is, once again, a manifestation of psychic ability. The creator has in effect impressed himself upon his work in a metaphysical (in the current scientific meaning) sense. This explanation makes sense of the frequently observed phenomenon that there seems to be a limit to certain "gadget-masters— creativity, that they will sometimes have to disassemble an old device to get a new one to work. This explanation also makes it simple to predict that attempts by governments all over the world to replicate the astounding Modular Man android are doomed to failure, unless one or more contract the services of "wild talents" of their own. . . .

. . . A feature of almost all aces is a higher-energy metabolism than "normal" humans possess. Some seem able to summon up the energy to fue! their abilities from within themselves, or (for want of a better way of putting it) from the Cosmos. Others either need externa! sources of energy to power their talents, or find themselves aided by the availability of such sources. The black strongman known as the Harlem Hammer, for example, finds it necessary to consume a substantial amount of heavy-metal salts in his diet to maintain the high-level reactions of his metabolism, as well as a number of "bone-seekers" such as strontium-90 and barium-140, which seem to be replacing the calcium in his bones, giving them greater-than-normal durability and strength. Jumpin' Jack Flash draws strength and sustenance from exposure to fire and heat. Others derive their extrahuman energy from "batteries," which generally prove to be of the same genus as the Hieronymus-type devices. Whatever the source of this energy, no ace has yet been discovered who could not exhaust her or his supply, in a reasonably short time, by intensive exertion of metahuman abilities. Some can "recharge" simply by resting for a time, others actually require an external power supply. Again, each case is unique. . . .

Further confirmation of the "psychic" hypothesis comes from the case of the so-called Sleeper, who possesses a different set of meta-abilities every time he awakens from sleep. Any other model for the function of ace powers would have difficulty accounting for this phenomenon. . . .

My colleagues and I are willing, in sum, to go so far as to say that psi can account for all observed ace abilities—and that no other explanation can. . . .