by Victor Allen
**********
George Walburn has found no comfort beneath fate's umbrella. His life has been one of being gut-kicked and back-stabbed, and the only thing that he anticipates with any eagerness is death. But whatever gods there might be will not be denied their fun. The old voodoo witch doctor, Unk Maum, had told him so. Not even in the supposed serenity of the grave can George find solace. Find out why in We Are the Dead...
Available at www.wandilland.com
Xeno Sapiens
by
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2006 all rights reserved
From Xeno Sapiens...
4
Ingrid said, “It’s stunning, isn’t it?”
Merrifield had seen what was in the incubator on the other side of the three inch thick glass before, but he was still awed by what Ingrid had accomplished in the preceding sixty days.
Inside the incubator- wired with electronic monitoring systems, plastic feed tubes, trays and bottles of chemicals, and God only knew what other kind of bizarre trappings-was a complete human skeleton and the ligaments binding the bones. Just that, nothing else.
The inside of the incubator was in eerie twilight, lit only by black light, carefully monitored and controlled to allow the most effective dosage of UV light to strike the bone. The incubator was more sterile than the chip factories of Silicon Valley. Access to its interior was strictly limited by Ingrid. Not even Merrifield had been allowed inside.
“It’s like something out of Brave New World, isn’t it?” Merrifield spoke with almost religious reverence. His eyes never left the skeleton.
“Almost,” Ingrid said. “But better. This is real.”
The skeletal frame was eight feet long from crown to heel. Heavy boned, yet perfectly proportioned for both strength and agility. The codons had come from three different tissue samples. No single cell contained the precise order Ingrid wanted. She settled on a combination of three gene packages made up of some thirty thousand codons and had them assembled on a single RNA strand.
The skeleton’s legs were long and graceful. They had come from a United States Olympic track star who had donated some of his cells, having no idea what they would be used for. The skeleton’s arms had come from a huge, black pulp logger who stood nearly seven feet tall. The rest of the skeleton had come from one of the largest and strongest men Merrifield had ever known, an Iowa wheat farmer named Charles Weaver.
The pelvic girdle was wide, a must for the huge bands of abdominal muscle Ingrid planned to attach. The ribcage was huge and spacious, plenty of room for a large heart and lungs. Where the ribs met the sternum, the cartilage glistened a ghostly, whitish blue. The skeleton’s massive skull lay serenely on the incubator’s work table, toothless because teeth were not made of bone. Fascinatingly, incrementally increasing exposure to gamma rays such as would be found outside the protective cloak of the earth’s magnetic field had altered the DNA of the osteoblasts, resulting in radical remodeling of the skeleton.
The nasal passages had increased in length, forcing the cranium upwards and backwards, elongating it. The ocular orbits had opened, ostensibly in evolutionary response to the expectation of less diffused light. They stretched, in a cat’s eye mask, from the diminutive bridge of the nose almost to the center of where the temple would be on a normal skull.
“How did you get it so large, so fast?” Merrifield asked.
“Enzymes and pituitary hormones. Once the cells started dividing, it took off. It was really amazing to watch it as it grew. It started at the pelvic girdle, then to the skull and down to the legs at the same time, as if it were following a pattern.”
“Certainly you had the mRNA programmed in the ribosomes?”
“Sure, but how does it know what shape to take? All we know about the genes is that they instruct the cells to manufacture specific amino acids. That still doesn’t explain how it shapes those building blocks.” Ingrid shook her head. She crossed her arms against her chest and looked longingly at the skeleton.
Merrifield saw her expression and thought he knew what she was thinking.
“Even with all we know,” he said quietly, “some things are still a puzzle, aren’t they?”
“They are,” she agreed. “But there’s no puzzle that can’t be solved, is there?”
“Sometime earlier, I might have said yes. Now, I don’t know.” Merrifield had always believed the project could be done, but he hadn’t expected to discover they were making it work with only the slightest idea of how cellular processes worked. It was a more than a little daunting, like mixing highly volatile chemicals in the dark.
“Did you know,” Ingrid said, “The skeleton doesn’t even have any nerves or blood vessels? It’s only now developing marrow.”
Merrifield was aghast. “Surely you jest. How are you keeping it alive?”
Ingrid tapped her temple. “ATP active transport and Osmosis. Seth gets a bath in glucose solution most of the day. When we take him out for display purposes, he gets a saline bath and his solution gets changed to keep the sodium-potassium ratio balanced. Occasionally, we have to run the solution through a dialysis machine when toxins build up.”
“You named him Seth? Isn’t that a little autocratic?”
“Naming him Adam would have been autocratic.”
“If you say so,” Merrifield responded doubtfully. The project had passed realism for him long before. “What’s next?”
Ingrid spoke in her best lecture voice. “The heart and circulatory system. We’ll use a heart lung machine temporarily, and he can be fed intravenously. We won’t have that big a problem with waste products until the musculature forms, but the liver and excretory systems will be on line by then.”
Merrifield nodded. The term Ingrid had used, on line, made him a little uneasy.
“How long?”
“When you said a three year project, you weren’t far off. We should have a working model in two years. That leaves us about eight months to fix something in case I blunder.”
“You? Blunder?”
“We might as well he realistic. Nothing like this has ever been tried before.”
Merrifield still found it hard to believe that a genetically tailored human being was being constructed, protein by painstaking protein, in his lab. He rested a comforting arm on Ingrid’s shoulder.
“I’m very pleased. This is a more than we could have hoped for.”
Ingrid looked at the skeleton. “It may not look like much to anyone else, but we know what it took to get there.”
“It’s your baby, right.” Merrifield said.
Ingrid stiffened.
“That’s a damned funny thing to say to a woman.”
Merrifield’s remark reminded her of the letter in her scrapbook where the woman had written that Ingrid wanted to give birth to the messiah out of a test tube. It was a serendipity for which she had no great love. The baroqueness of her endeavors was becoming clearer to her each day. She did feel like Victor Frankenstein, seeking the secrets of life itself, needing to dissect its minutiae and cut it into irreducible form. But she had set her goals for this very level, knocking them down one by one like a lifetime game of pitch-til-u-win, trading up at each successful toss of the pellet.
“My apologies,” Merrifield said. “It was a poor choice of words.”
He studied the skeleton, watching the thin mist rise from the bones that had been coated in dry ice for display. The mist-shrouded bones lay in the darkness of the incubator, glowing like ’70’s black light posters. Two attendants hovered anxiously over their prize. Instead of picks, shovels and ropes, they wielded plasma packs and drugs. Gone were the top hats and gravedigger capes, replaced by white, antiseptic coveralls. They lent the scene a more macabre aspect than if a certifiably mad scientist had been sifting through the ruins of a charnel pit with a lunatic sexton.
Merrifield suppressed a shudder. Stupid. His ultimate triumph should not be censured in deference to some atavistic loathing that w
as twenty-four carat horse shit. The pragmatism of the real world was his domain and the shiver and shake of fantasy and horror had lost their forbiddingly enticing sparkle. Still, he wished for a drink.
“You’ll keep me informed?”
“You’ll know everything,” Ingrid told him.
He turned and walked away. Halfway across the room, he turned to say something.
Ingrid was still looking at the skeleton. Merrifield watched her silently for a few seconds, then continued on his way.
5
As the winter of 2002 melted into the spring of that year, it bade good bye to the skiers and hello to the trout fishermen in their floppy, crushed cotton hats decorated with colorful flies. While the fishermen cast their lines into the fast running rivers of snow melt, Ingrid’s skeleton began to organize into a sentient creation.
Oddly enough to the layman, but an absolute necessity for protein synthesis, a massive liver was the first organ Ingrid developed. The huge, four lobed mass wasn’t sexy; it wasn’t a glamor organ, but it was a powerhouse, charged with constructing proteins and immunoglobulins, as well as detoxification of the blood of everything from free, toxic iron and porphyrin rings, to urea.
The heart and circulatory system became operational in April of that year. The entire research team took turns gazing in rapture at the large, thick muscle rhythmically beating in sympathy with electronic pulses. Synthetic blood laden with organic chemicals and pituitary extracts circulated by portal circulation to the liver hepatocytes in vessels which were elevated on voluminous plastic bags (as was the heart itself) and kept from hemorrhaging by strict atmospheric controls.
The liver hepatocytes dutifully took the tailored codes for protein production and churned out the proteins that built every structure in the body from CD markers to the organs themselves. Later that same month, genuine blood was introduced, as well as bone marrow cells of a very special nature. These marrow cells were fortified with antigen producing templates for every curable disease known to man and some that weren’t. They circulated in the bloodstream and eventually made their way to the virgin marrow of the long bones where they began to differentiate and replicate.
An experimental gene recombinant cytokine – a modification of the chemical Interleuken II- had been developed by a Chinese doctor at the Alamo. It had shown great promise in its ability to recognize and destroy not only cancer-causing viruses, but also pre-cancerous cells. The existence of natural killer T-cells had been known for some time, but now the specific information for production of the killer cytokines had been written into the cellular DNA structure, only waiting to be cloned into a viral serum for the suffering masses.
As each tissue or structure formed, its composition was recorded and amended. Useless substrates of each amino acid -adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine, and uracil- hung forlornly like threads needing to be tied together. One injection of specifically constructed viral DNA could invade the cell nuclei and link up with the inactive DNA threads like two parts of an intricate oriental carpet of wildly differing design being woven together, initiating specific protein synthesis.
The novel arrangement would shut down some genes and activate new ones. With these injections hair or eye color could be changed with nothing more than a hypodermic needle; the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thesis actually made flesh. Flippers or gills, fangs, paws or claws could be substituted for legs or lungs, teeth or hands.
Chromatophore DNA from squids or chameleons could be incorporated into human DNA, resulting in perfect blending with the environment. No proof it would work as yet, but it seemed within reach. Processes at the molecular level cared nothing for rejection. It was pure stoichiometric chemistry. They either bonded or they didn’t. And if each substrate could be matched with a corresponding pyrimidine or purine which began the genetic sequence of tailored genes representing other structures, there was no reason for it not to work.
While amateur spelunkers poked and prodded their way through the numerous mountain caverns, an immensely complex system of nerves wound its tortuous way through the maze of bone and blood vessels. White ganglia wormed their way into intricate and beautiful plexi while a thick cord of nerve threaded its way through the hollows of the spinal column.
Unknown to Ingrid, Jake Macmillan (who would be quite insane by the project’s end) had been spirited away from the university and safely segregated at Fort Mead, Maryland, laboring endlessly over a new computer program designed to trace codons by mathematical processes that extrapolated on haplotypes instead of its current ‘hunt and peck’ system.
In the short span of two months, July and August, Seth’s excretory and respiratory systems developed. The research team collectively held its breath as the oxygen exchanger was removed. The lungs were kept from collapsing under the pressure of one and a half atmospheres by the oxygen saturated fluid within them. Telemetry showed rapid fire neurospasms from the Vagus nerve vainly attempting to control a diaphragm not yet developed. The exchanger was quickly reinstalled and oxygen levels returned to 115% of normal.
Seth’s development now entered the realm of the lab techs, who constantly monitored glutathione levels in the harsh, supersaturated oxygen environment. Lecithin and sphingomyelin ratios were recorded, slowly inching towards the day that Seth’s lungs could provide his own oxygen.
Towards the end of August, Ingrid and Alex went out again, just to keep in touch with the real world.
“Did you ever think we would come this far,” Clifton asked.
Ingrid shook her head. “I didn’t know at first. I believed it could be done, but not like this. With every new system that forms, I get the feeling the whole project was predestined for success. Like it was something that was always meant to be.”
“You’re not taking much credit.”
“I don’t feel much like taking credit today,” she said sadly. “I had somebody removed from the project. I know you’ve heard about it.”
Clifton didn’t bother to pretend he knew nothing about the hostile face-off. Johnny Clark was a rather uninspired organic chemist who had risen through the ranks by virtue of some distant nepotism with Merrifield. Clifton had never liked him, preferring to keep his distance from the fawning, morose youth who had his head so far up Merrifield’s ass he hadn’t seen daylight in years. Clark was a backstabber, a whining, wheedling gold digger who didn’t know his ass from a taco and had the IQ of a bowl of grits. He used his relationship with Merrifield to grease the axles for him. As far as Clifton could tell, he had never contributed one iota to the project.
“He was sneaking around the incubator today,” Ingrid said. “Trying to get in. ‘Just to have a look’, he said. That much I can believe. I don’t think he has the balls to try sabotage or the brains to try and sell information.”
Clifton grunted knowingly. Ingrid was fanatical about access to the incubator. Clifton knew that just one bacterium in the environment of the incubator could reproduce and spread like herpes at a ’70’s key party, jeopardizing the entire project. And with oxygen levels at 115% of normal, the danger of a major conflagration was an ever present danger.
Ingrid didn’t know it, but Merrifield had been livid when he heard the news. Distant relative or not, Merrifield had no great affection for Johnny Clark, and he was far more concerned that sterility might have been broken than with what happened to Clark.
Clifton had witnessed Merrifield’s rage. His face had flared a bright crimson and his wild gesticulations and bulging blood vessels had been reminiscent of a man suffering an attack of apoplexy.
“Who does this little shithead think he is,” Merrifield had raved, acid dripping from every word. His jaw muscles jumped and sweat popped out on his meaty forehead, glittering like chrome flecks.
“I will have his frigging head for this,” Merrifield had roared, each word as precise and cutting as the guillotine’s blade.
Clifton had sat through the tirade, offering not a soothing word or placating gesture. He well knew, w
hen Merrifield was in such a mood, it was best to let him wear himself out. After a few minutes of vigorous screaming, Merrifield plopped down in his chair and sat there, panting. He jabbed a finger at Clifton.
“I want him out of here,” he said, speaking in harsh bursts. “I want him gone before I have to see his face again. Tell him if I ever see him again, I’ll put him against the wall and cut out his heart. I’m making it your responsibility to make sure he understands that. Got it?”
“I’ll see to it,” Clifton had said.
“You’d damn well better,” Merrifield had snapped. He was grumbling under his breath when Clifton left to attend the messy details of giving Clark the boot.
“I had to do it,” Ingrid said. “I hate the thought I’ve become so hard and unforgiving I had to make an example of somebody, but I won’t let everything I’ve – we’ve- worked for, go down the crapper because of a low level lackey who thinks he’s privileged.”
“If you’re looking for sympathy,” Clifton said, “you won’t find it here. You did the right thing.”
“You don’t have to patronize me.”
“Good Christ, Ingrid,” Clifton said, irritated. He rolled his eyes. “Do you need a picture drawn for you? You’re the brains of this project. You’re perfectly within your rights to shitcan somebody who goes against directives. Clark is fucked for life, now. The only hopes he has of ever having another decent job is to keep his mouth shut. And he will, if he knows what’s in his best interests for staying out of jail.”
“You think so?”
“I think so,” Clifton said, recalling the uncontrollable fury Clark’s action had engendered In Merrifield today. Days like today, Clifton didn’t care much for Merrifield, but he knew he would never cross him. Call it cowardice or self preservation, it all came down to keeping your head firmly attached to your shoulders.
By November of 2002, Seth’s visceral digestive organs had developed. He began to look less like a partially dissected med school cadaver and more like a human being. At this stage of development, Seth had begun to replenish his own blood supply and the constantly hovering lab techs took the opportunity to monitor the quick destruction of fetal hemoglobin and its transformation into HgbA and HgbA2. Massive amounts of bilirubin and urobilinogen were produced and neutralized by the same high doses of UV and gamma ray radiation that Seth had been constantly subjected to. Even before his birth, life had found a way and his body had adapted to external environments.
That same month, a penniless and disgruntled Johnny Clark still had had no luck finding a job as cushy as the one from which he had been so ignobly dismissed.
He recalled an old and dusty family skeleton and began making inquiring phone calls to the Natural Christian’s Salvation center. He was told politely but firmly that Josh Hall was redeeming the hell bound and could not be bothered. The caller was welcome to try again once Mr. Hall had established his quota of converts for the month. Clark hung up, saying he would be in touch.
Seth’s musculature began to take shape. Band over band of thick, striated red muscle appeared in fleshy sheets, enveloping already functioning bone, nerves and blood vessels.
Eyes (Clifton’s own clones) put in their appearance by late December of 2002. They stared blackly straight ahead, unmoving and unblinking, unable to interpret any images.
The pons, cerebellum and medulla had already formed, being, really, only extensions of the spinal cord. The cerebrum had yet to develop.
Ingrid had devoted a great deal of time to the development of a ‘community brain’, a cerebrum that combined vast comprehensive ability with some super normal brain functions.
Drawing on some little known (and mostly hushed up) work by Kensington and Hart, she had isolated and synthesized some of the rarest genes ever classified. These genes controlled the functions of certain talented pituitary glands. Under stress, these glands produced chemicals with names so long and twisty they were usually referred to by-only their acronyms: RTGH, DFGH and BUPL. These chemicals produced many definitely desirable effects: Cryokinesis, telekinesis, pyrokinesis, telepathy, telempathy. Such traits were not supernatural, but extremely rare and impure, and were now within trembling reach.
During the long nights in which she could find no sleep, she thought of something Hubert had once told her in reference to Josh Hall: “They’s so many people wants to grow up and slay the dragon in this world. But most times that dragon will just turn around, and eat you right up.”
Josh Hall had said she was a dragon, and now she was on the brink of calling his hand. The real dragon was the straitjacketing of minds closed too long. For too long people had thrust themselves into the jaws of chance. They lacked vision.
Now winter, with its snow and ice, had again settled mistily on the Appalachians. Ingrid found it hard to believe, but an entire year had passed. She wasn’t a prisoner; she came and went as she pleased. Yet the disturbing fact remained. She remembered nothing at all that didn’t concern the project. Even her occasional nights out with Clifton had become less frequent. She was a little embarrassed to realize nothing more had come of it.
But in the near future, an event would occur that would show her that their relationship was more intertwined than mere business.
6
“Would you watch what you’re doing, for Christ’s sake?”
Clifton jerked around at Jimmy’s urgent shout. Jimmy and another tech had quickly retreated as far from the Helix depolarization chamber as they could. They stared at it with the frightened eyes of children.
The magnetic flywheel had somehow broken out of its race atop the machine and was spinning uncontrollably. Ever widening loops and swirls of caustic alkali solution whirled through the air in arcing streamers…