A small trailer was parked at the edge of town. In it a young woman was busy at work. her reddish brown hair was tied back behind her head. She had thin rimmed glasses on her face, and wore a lab coat. A doctors mask was over her face.
Her name was Lynn McGovern she was an agent of the CDC whose job it was to study the disease. She wasn't the only government type investigating the town. Between the threat of a possible bioweapon release here making the changes, the odd information here that contradicts things known to the outside world including reference entries that exist only in copies of books in this town, and the bizarre possibility the town could have dropped from a paralell universe if the weirder science types are right, all sorts of people are studying this place, mostly in secret.
Lynn was lying low but not keeping secret. She was glad she was secure enough in her beleif that the threat was minor to get out of her decontamination suit. But still even despite the filtered rpessureized air in her mobile trailer lab, she still prefered to wear a doctors mask just to be safe. Over the last few days she got medical information and blood and tissue samples from doctors, schools, nursing homes, and anyplace else with medical staff she could find. She even lucked out the doctors had some early blood samples on display.
looking through her microscope she noticed the virus was very similar morphologically to the common cold, but it had a very low mutation rate in the shape of its protein coat compared to the cold. but these recent cases were different, their shape was very much changed. She looked through a slide at the earliest tissues and saw a smaller second virus in the sampled. She ran some tests and models and saw the second virus had a much smaller genome, but it had some similarities between the genome stretches of the mutation virus that were different from the cold.
She put on her decontamination suit and entered a mini airlock in the rear of her trailer lab, passed through a decontamination shower (she goes through on entering to remove contaminants, and to leave to prevent the disease from spreading) and went to the tissue samples. She saw infected tissue with the new strain had higher degrees of cell mutation than the older strains. The common cold infected ones used as a control group were more or less unaffected. She decided to take one of the common cold infected sampled and add the new virus to it. What she saw through the microscope was amazing.
Both the mystery virus and the common cold infected the cells, but as well as entering the cell to make copies of its own genome the mystery viruses genome also got added to the genome of the common cold changing it to become the transformation virus.
"interesting" she said aloud to herself. Maybe this is why the mystery virus has a low mutation rate, it inhibits the cold it infects while altering it.
Even more alarming were the differences between the old and new transformation virus. The part given to it by the mystery virus was the same, the part from the common cold was different. After years of being protected from the cold by the transformation virus a new strain of the cold made a foothold in a resident and created a very different transformation virus. She had to tell someone about this.
