Ava raises her hand. “Is this going anywhere?”
Job says. “I thought I was the class clown.”
He moves forward as if lost in a memory, looking at his hands. “DNA aging process is basically rebuilding-errors due to sluggish cells. So DNA coding and cellular repair error, cut life short, plain and simple.”
Lou looks lost in his seat, thinking. The human brain is the most impressive thing in the known universe, once alive it never turns off, only during death and during math exams.
“Sir2-gene stimulates enzymes. It was the first gene of the sirtuin genes to be found. Sirtuins are hypothesized to play a key role in lifespan and extending effects in organisms through calorie restriction and heat stress. Preliminary studies with resveratrol, a possible SIRT1-gene activator, led some scientists to speculate that resveratrol may extend lifespan. Initial tests did prove to extend lifespans in different animals like with monkeys by starving them and reducing their caloric intake by thirty percent, they lived thirty percent longer because it helped accelerate cell repair. The primates quality of life was diminished and they lived longer to be poked and prodded to help us live longer. Animals are tortured to develop makeup, why not for the purpose of immortality?” Prophet takes a much needed sip of water. People think they want to know all the details until they hear the details.
Job says. “Don’t you dare bad mouth science, wasn’t there a word for that, dogma or dogshit, I can’t remember. Humans evolved from apes and evolved to find mates to fuck, not coexist together. Why is this so hard to accept? Money is not natural, but it sure does help you get laid. Music and every other reason under the sun, religious zealots tried to use to debunk the evolutionary theory. I say please refer to the money solution created by a person to get some ass. He was the best of us, he was a genius to everyone not born with model looks. Reproduction is the only reason we exist. But we evolved to love fucking minus the children, no other animal does that. I get why you chose monkeys, Prophet, don’t let it eat you up.”
Ava looks at Job. “Thanks for that. I’m sure your wife loves to hear that the only reason she exists is for juice to come out of your pickle. Now, I know why you ain’t getting any.” Then to the Prophet. “So long story short, you destroy mankind. Get the fuck out of here.” She lowers her arms from over her head.
A pot of beans is boiling; Job licks his lips and snaps in his false teeth. “I heard this spiel already, hell I’m hungry.”
Ava pulls her head up from between her legs, her face flush. “Ugh, I don’t care about any of this, get to the outbreak.”
The Prophet says. “I like to explain myself somewhat thoroughly to eliminate questions such as why, how, when…instead of talking backwards to make myself clear. Everyone wants to hear the whole story, but never in order because of impatience.”
The pithy Ava clutches her imagery pearl necklace. “Excuse me.”
Lou says. “Come on Ava, what’s the rush? I love a good scary urban legend by the campfire. Do you all have any marshmallows?” Youngblood has his chin in his palm with his elbow on a crossed knee, concentrating on the Prophet. Lou slaps Youngblood’s stomach with his knuckles, and says to him. “Are you taking notes?” Youngblood leans away.
The Prophet says. “I don’t know if you’re familiar with the disease Progeria.” Ava and her friends shake their heads.
The Prophets says. “How about the cases, where small children age too fast and look like their grandparents before puberty.” The Prophet looks around. “I thought so. Well, my team and I were studying some children with Progeria and other rare aging diseases. Mind you, our research had multiple potential applications. But, what if we could not just postpone the aging process, but could also fast-forward it. Our government was planning on using this version for the penal system. No longer would we have to house prisoners for multiple life sentences and waste billion of dollars. We could simply give them an injection and take away their years and then use that money to send every kid to a four year university at no cost to them…the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Lou says. “Who was going to be immortal? Rich white people.” Ava smirks like get this guy a beer.
The Prophet takes a sip of water from his metal flask. “Humans produce around one thousand various proteins from twenty-two thousand structural genes. With this much mind-boggling data to work with, I initially chose to study rare aging diseases, like Progeria. To try to find the genes that trigger heighten aging and then work to find a way to reverse the effect to keep humans alive longer…and to answer your question Lou maybe or maybe terrorists would live forever, we will never know.”
Ava takes off her shirt-scarf and rocks in her seat. “Okay.”
The Prophet takes another sip. “Clams live for hundreds of years and glass-like fish live for thousands. So we studied different animals with incredible aging and humans with horrible aging and tried to discover the link and worked our way from the middle rather than from the bottom of ignorance. Eventually, my team indirectly created a serum that turned mammals immortal because tests showed that their Telomerase never shorten after mitosis or cell creation. Cells kept growing and did not stop like normal cells that reproduce only sixty times then die. Keep in mind that cancer cells are immortal too that is why they kill you, they keep reproducing Telomerase and you get tumors all over your body.”
The Prophet looks in the distance and says to himself. “There had to be a way to keep the good and suppress the bad when it came to cell regeneration and subsequently postponing aging. Pre-birth, parents were already choosing traits for their kids, like looks, intelligence, and personality, like Gods from the comfort of their homes. But, aging was the last secret to humankind. What’s the point of being the best for a short period of time. If I could crack the DNA code, our smartest minds would never have to die and mankind could advance not only technologically, but socially as well which is the greater difficulty.”
Job flicks his spoon. “We come from monkeys, where have they all gone to, they turned into monsters like us, that’s a huge coincidence. Let’s talk about that.”
Youngblood snaps at Job. “Enough with the monkey business.”
Ava snaps her fingers and the Prophet says. “Excuse my tangent.” He reties his auburn ponytail as Lou opens another can with his Swiss Army knife.
The Prophet rubs his grinning mouth. “Everything was going fine, until we got wind that another company had the same goal and might be closer to discovery than us. We didn’t have approval for human testing and we might never get it. Great discoveries live and die based on bureaucracy not on the common good.”
Ava says. “Did you fancy yourself a Prometheus or a Dr. Frankenstein?”
The Prophet says. “I believe they’re essentially the same person.”
Lou says. “Or did you want to be Conner Macleod of the Clan Macleod?”
Youngblood laughs to himself.
Job says to the Prophet. “Yeah, I’m going to start calling you the Highlander, not the Prophet.” The Prophet and Ava look at each other in puzzlement.
Job says. “People need an incentive to change, and then it comes down to their will or by force. A monkey told me that.”
Ava says to Job. “Shut your hillbilly ass up.”
The Prophet clears his throat and starts again. “The groupthink of our company was to do whatever was necessary to win and so one day my colleagues were feeling the pressure of losing their jobs and so some injected themselves with the current formula. Nothing happened for a week, then some of the men and women were regaining their hair and others losing their wrinkles. We actually discovered how to reverse the aging process, which was better than we planned for. Then a few weeks later all the test subjects were getting older and more aggressive everyday and losing language skills. Each of them had stopped manufacturing serotonin in their brains and this neurotransmitter affects everything from appetite to aggression. We tried to help them with pain relievers and experimental drugs we ha
d, just to stop their suffering. These test subjects had high IQs, but could not talk and get dressed anymore, and so had to be secluded in the laboratory in secret. These were my friends and I felt I could help them before the government killed them...One night, I personally gave one of the guys a blood transfusion because I was desperate and the new blood actually took away his aggression, but not his old age. After a few days he thanked me and I never saw him again.”
Ava say to Lou. “You hearing this horseshit.” She looks at the Prophet. “I’m sorry, it’s just that you have one of those faces, I can’t trust.” She lifts her hands to her chest. “No offense.”
Lou says. “I don’t know, it sounds pretty plausible, he created aging immortals who crave blood.”
Ava says. “What about the meteorites with a new virus. I like that yarn of a tale, a helluva lot better.”
Lou says. “So meteorites carrying a new plague from our universe or even from a different dimension, is less ludicrous than a manmade virus that fuck the world in the ass.”
Ava rubs her palms against each other in Lou’s face. “I think that the two theories are connected, more than Bill Nye is letting on. He created immortality conveniently after the meteorites landed. I don’t have a doctorate degree, but I don’t need one to understand bullshit.”
Job mumbles to himself. “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”
The group looks at the Prophet to confirm Ava’s suspicions. He simply lifts his shoulders. Youngblood comes back from using the restroom, he says. “What I miss?”
The other woman says. “The other company was working with organisms from Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Frozen particles were blasted into space from an asteroid impact on the moon’s surface. This was the impetus of the Great Bombardment of meteorites on Earth. You may be onto something…Ava.”
Lou says. “Women always stick together.”
Job nudges his wife in the belly with a sneer on his face and she towers away.
The Prophet rubs his hands together quickly and breathes into them. “Like I was saying. We were also tampering with the Telomerase enzyme, which I believe is the reason our patients were in constant pain, but couldn’t die. You see cancer cells are immortal they never stop replicating unlike normal cells and the Telomerase enzyme can contribute to cancer and that’s exactly what we found in our test patients, tumors had scattered throughout their body, but they couldn’t die or stop reproducing their new cells.”
Ava lies down on her log, with her arms and legs slouching off the sides like a surfboard, she looks up at the stars. “Did you try to kill any of them or would that be too unethical?”
The Prophet says. “I deserve that. One patient injected herself, trying to perform euthanasia on herself, most methods, first put you asleep then stops your heart and breathing. This woman was in charge of the Epigenetics experiments, which is turning on genes in our body that nature has suppressed in us.”
Lou says. “So what happened to her?”
The Prophet says. “She took the poison, waited for a moment, walked out of the building, ran into the street and was hit by a truck. Attempting double suicide. She was my wife.”
Ava sits up in a quick burst. “You didn’t try to stop her?” Upset as if he shot his wife in the face.
The Prophet says. “Of course I did. I ran after her through the building, and caught up to her on the steps and block her way down. I told her I will never stop trying to help her. She kissed me then pushed me down the steps and ran before I could stop her…I carried her body back into the lab, but that’s a different story.” Youngblood’s biting his nails.
Lou rubs his eyes. “My fucking head hurts after listening to all that.”
Job’s slipping from the spoon like a baby. “Ooh that’s hot.” The Prophet kneels and drinks from the bowel of beans and deer meat as if it were cereal.
Ava says. “I’ll take a serving.”
A few minutes after the strangers are enjoying their food. The woman says to everyone. “Please, help yourself. Excuse my rude husband.”
The Prophet turns his head away and burps, then looks at everyone. “Excuse me, I ate too fast. You know this, everyone does, corporations, governments, and organized religions are not physical things, they’re people and so long as people are flawed each of these will be flawed, but that doesn’t mean we should turn our backs on the idea of a harmonious society, why give up? It’s not the government’s fault, everything in this life and in this world is people’s fault, they are the creators and controllers of ideas, so change people. I have. It sounds easy enough, but only when forced to change or die, do people even consider true change.”
The yellow in Job’s eyes pop in the limelight. “What’s the point? We’re the last generation.”
The Prophet ignores Job. “Presently, we’re fighting our past decisions and have no future if we can’t coexist. Success in anything starts with good leadership. But after a disaster, legitimate criticism is greatly reduced in our leaders because of a psychological concept called ‘rally around the flag effect,’ which basically means good people will follow poor decisions, for example like after a hurricane or tornado when decisions are not critically questioned due to people’s short-term selfishness concerns. We are in a constant crisis now and this limited time concept will become the norm and standard of how things operate. This is exactly the time period we live in now, where good men and women are going to make horrible decisions and he/she will be applauded for it by their followers. This behavior will be the end of humanity, not the monsters. Everyone left will have to step up and look past petty differences and create or follow a viable plan where everyone is a winner, some people will have to work harder and help the weak, but that should not deter anyone from living together. People are equal and deserve equal rights, a egalitarian society is the only way humans win.”
Ava says. “Crisis is the status quo. People do have the power, but they give it away everyday to other people and ideas. Willingly and unwillingly. Trust takes time and we are in short supply to create a utopia. Everything you just said, sounds good on paper or in a sound bite, but the harsh reality is that people defined their existence by being different and having more than the other person. A person wants to be an individual, but also to be part of a group, if not, go live on a deserted island alone. People do love to be social, but even they join certain social groups to be better and different. Who am I to judge other people, I can only judge their actions that affect me. You can do and say whatever you want in this life, but so can I.”
Lou says to the Prophet. “There is no more bad guys just bad decisions, everyone has their own idea of survival and odds of those ideas being helpful to everyone is low. Not everyone can live together, so we’ll die alone. The quicker you accept that the happier you’ll be.”
5
David stands under the high dome ceiling. Maybe this was a bad idea.
The hospital atrium looks like it has been on the ocean floor for centuries, but still familiar and comforting to the roving David. A microcosm of a netherworld coalesced with an olio of putrefaction odors.
A wayward stranger traveling alone, his arms and legs crossing, gently moving farther into the darkness, a flashlight in one hand and a knife in the other. He limelights an image ingrained in the wall. Fret face, he whispers. “The stairs, the stairs.” Gazing into the map, rote learning the image, he presses his wet forehead against the image. “Left, left, right, left.”
The water and decay has warped the ceiling and floors turning the hallways into a spiraling funhouse in a carnival, with a discomforting perspective.
Tiptoeing around a corner, the flashlight leads the way and by happenstance, he finds a zombie in a opposite corner, twitching like a crack addict, with its back to David. He lets the flashlight hang from his wrist and walks with the knife pointing down over his head like a movie serial killer. The flashlight swings, the zombie is in the light for a second then disappears. David holds his breath, regrips the knife slantw
ise, and harpoons for the zombie’s throat. The gawking zombie has turned to face David sometime during the slow journey down the hallway. David forces its body against the wall, it has the blade in his hand as David pushes off with his back leg. “Fucker.”
The hospital has perfectly preserved the abject zombie’s body mass and strength from the elements of nature. David lets out a sound reminiscent of an exhalation during a workout. The swinging disco light only shows fangs for a second, then nothing. Panic fills his soul.
Zombies are running around the corner that he just came from, David knows because of the commotion is within earshot. He punches the zombie fighting for its life, in the ribs, forgetting whom he’s dealing with. The punch has no effect. He lets the zombie keep the knife, grabs the zombie’s shoulders, and smashes its body into the wall, the wall pushes its eyes out of its saclike head and the body goes soft like jelly.
David places palms flat and hops left over wreckage, runs straight with his flashlight again. Slips and falls on his elbow, reversing his course, right. At the door to the stairway, David steps back as far as he can and opens the door with his knife high. What he sees kills him. The stairs are jumbled together like an Escher painting, unusable. The stairs shift and clash against the walls, collapsing to the bottom floor when David closes the door. I wonder if anyone heard that.
David is bouncing on his heels like a fighter looking at the exit door. There’s a stampede of footfalls on the floor above him, flakes of dust rain down from the molding ceiling. The stairs are still inciting a ruckus and clanging like a construction site. He jogs away, his hand is a light tower, shining left to right and back again.
Genesis Virus Page 42