1: Lab 1a

Days like these, Dr Alex Sorber wondered if his brain was actually connected to his body. Days like these, it didn't feel as if it still was. Perhaps, he mused, some demonic nocturnal surgeon had entered his bedroom under the cover of darkness and somehow severed the ganglia connecting his apparently functioning body from his brain - a brain that couldn't now raise itself to enter an implacable waking world. It was habit that got him ready for work this day and he moved automatically from room to room enveloped in a sleep-induced fog - bedroom, bathroom, kitchen - before a final, casual check in the hallway mirror. Sorber took a moment to shrug at his appearance - short brown hair cropped around neat, unlined features lit by bright hazel eyes - and then, coffee in hand, he skipped down two flights of a drab communal stairway and outside into the dim early morning light.

He stood for a few moments by the faded wooden signage that told the world that his home was in Waterloo Place - 'A Luxury Back Bay Apartment Complex' and he shook his head at the optimistic description. He felt the cold morning air nip at the exposed skin of his face and watched as the first shafts of sunlight fought their way through rain clouds to cast an ethereal glow across another November morning. A stillness hung in the air, the sounds of downtown Boston seemed muffled and remote, as if life had decided to allow itself a brief pause before the day's events unfolded.

He crossed the street that was still damp from the previous evening's downpour and slid into the front seat of his beloved bronze coupé - an old General Motors model that first rolled off a production line back in '95. The vehicle - which had undergone a costly refit in order to comply with the government's draconian and desperate environmental protection laws - now had an expensive auto-drive function that would take responsibility for the daily trip to Sorber's place of work at BioMimetica, nine miles due north of the city. It was the best way of ensuring his safe arrival in his parking space at the other end of the journey and gave him the luxury of spending a while longer coming to terms with the practicalities of the world each morning.

En route, as the morning sky grew darker under the weight of brooding, gestating clouds, Sorber ran a finger along the fine layer of dust that had accumulated on the dashboard of the car, reminding himself to have the vehicle cleaned soon. He clicked on the radio to hear the well-rehearsed and almost convincing voice of an anonymous politician on a news show, blithely announcing that economic recovery was just around the corner.

Recovery. Sorber turned the word over in his head a few times and thought of the Kali virus which had hit harder than anyone had ever dreamed possible. It was a cunning, artificially intelligent strain, developed by some delinquent hacker living in a Moscow slum, and it had knocked out electronic systems around the globe for several weeks. Kali had crashed computer networks at financial institutions, government agencies and power plants - and its malignant after-effects were still being felt even now, six months on from its devastating inception.

Sorber considered the distant crisis that was really a war, draining the nation's resources like a hungry vampire, and then there was the climate - no one really knew what the weather was up to any more - seasons now seemed to be all merged into an anarchic mixture of inconsistent and irregular weather patterns.