by Vincent Pet
***
Dr. Brenda Leduc coughed. It was not a good cough. Uric stood next to his friend. He had been with her for the last sixty years. He had followed her every move, from the time she took her first steps outside university to now, her last living breaths at her mountain side resort. Yes, she was his friend, had been his lover – and he had never felt like this for any human being in over one hundred thousand years.
She looked him over, scrutinizing him with her sharp, clear eyes. He fidgeted a little, like he always did when she gazed unflinchingly at him. What was she thinking? How many times had he come close to revealing the truth about himself?
“Henry, where is Maggie? She said she’d be here.”
Maggie was her companion.
“I spoke to her about two hours ago,” Uric replied. “They can’t find a pilot in Paris willing to fly to New York.”
She sighed dejectedly.
“How many pilots are left?”
“Worldwide? At last count about three thousand.”
They said nothing as she looked straight at the ceiling above her head.
“And yet, it shouldn’t be that heard to learn how to fly a plane on automatic pilot, should it?” she asked.
She sighed again.
“Could you open the window, Henry? I need some fresh air.”
Uric shook his head.
“Better not. There’s a high smog alert in the area. Fires in New York are spreading. Unfortunately, there are only about ten operative fire robots left. It seems that the city is having a hard time getting replacement parts to fix the broken ones and is searching for human volunteers to put out the fires.”
Brenda chuckled.
“I don’t think New York has had a real fireman in over fifty years!”
Then she looked at him, again very intensely.
“Henry, the doctor says I will die in less than three hours. That’s when my heart will fail.”
Uric felt something inside of him, something he should not have felt – not now, not when his goal was so near, not now when a ship was waiting for this moment to whisk him away from the planet and bring him back home.
With Dr. Brenda Leduc’s death, his assignment would be over. She was the most intelligent human being left alive and was the only real threat remaining to his plans.
“You will not continue the struggle, will you, my love?”
She uttered the words with such calm that it disarmed Uric. It was the brutal truth. He could only remain silent.
“Henry, where did we go wrong? When I first met you, I was certain that we would solve this enigma. You had so many ideas! Maybe… too many ideas?”
The way she ended her sentence made Uric quiver inside – she said it with such disappointment.
The urge to tell her everything, of who he really was, of where he came from… was stronger than ever. He needed very much to justify himself, to hear someone understand that what he had done, he had done for the good of a million other species. If there was one person he knew that would be able to understand him, it would be Brenda. Of this he was certain. Humanity could not contaminate the efforts of a million years of stellar harmony. Yes, she would understand this. Yet, he feared those lucid eyes. He feared to know how they would judge him; of what those eyes would tell him with her dying breath.
She was still scrutinizing his face as if she were looking at him for the very first time. Her mind was fervently searching for an answer to her questions even in her last remaining hours.
“Henry… I always had the sensation that you knew something the rest of us didn’t. I’ve always felt as if you were always two steps ahead of everyone else. That’s why I stayed with you. That’s why I believed so much in your research. This is what troubles me now. Why weren’t you able to do more than the rest of us?”
Uric shrugged, feeling very much uncomfortable.
“Maybe, love blinded me,” he replied. “Maybe, I should have concentrated more on my work when I was much younger instead of falling head over heels for you.”
A big, bittersweet smile crept over her face.
“Don’t give me that bull, Henry. Even when you swept me off my feet and told me to join your company to search for a cure, you were in perfect control of yourself. You always were in perfect control of everything. You should have guided us when we strayed. I don’t understand. You assembled the brightest team in the world to fight this virus and yet we lost so much time before we finally realized that the virus was a double edged sword. It not only attacked the pineal gland but activated random nonsense genes in the human genome, condemning future generations to idiocy. We should have put it together when the scientific community noticed that two Neanderthal like babies were born less than a year apart instead of discarding them as freaks of nature, but because the births were in third world countries, not many bothered to take the news seriously and do the necessary research.”
Uric remembered clearly how Brenda had discovered that the virus replaced SNPs of certain genes in the oocytes and sperm cells, turning genes which had been silent through a million years of primate evolution suddenly active in the fetus. The scientific community had named it ‘the dumb virus’ because it ultimately affected the intelligence of future generations as it played havoc with the genes. For a brief moment, he thought that his plans had failed again, but by the time Brenda discovered how the virus worked, it was too late. By that time, the odds that a cure could be found with the resources available was only 0.7%.
She shifted in her bed and by the way she folded her arms, Uric knew that she was about to divulge something that had been on her mind for a very long time.
“You know what I am starting to think? We concentrated too much time believing that the virus was attacking only the pineal gland. Sure, the high rise of melatonin led to a lower level of sexual drive which at first explained perfectly well the dramatic drop in birthrates throughout the world. Granted, we knew that the natural circadian rhythms were disrupted and concentrated on the mechanism of action of the virus on the gland, wondering why in men the melatonin levels remained high, leading to a state of comatose and hibernation, while in women the melatonin levels literally disappeared leading to an eternal zombie-like state… but I think it was all a camouflage, Henry.”
She was observing him steadily as she talked which made him stressed even further than he was. When Uric finally spoke, his voice was too guarded even if he only uttered one word.
“Camouflage?”
“Yes, camouflage. A disguise. A cloaked virus. It’s becoming clear, no? Henry, adults either couldn’t sleep anymore or started to hibernate and we all panicked. We all concentrated our energy on that aspect while our children were being born with a lower intelligence quotient. When we finally noticed what was happening, that our children were dumber than the previous generation, a decade had gone by. Still, many thought that it was a pollutant, something we had done to ourselves and no one ever thought that it could actually be the exact same virus that the Chinese supposedly brought back from the Jupiter mission.”
Uric could only admire her.
“Brenda, you should know that nature uses camouflage extensively. Some insects blend in with their environment to escape their prey, like walking stick insects which resemble tree bark. Humanity came in contact with such a concept in a viral form with tragic consequences. Now to see a conspiracy in this…”
He left the phrase die off, not knowing how to best complete it. Brenda had lost some of that harshness and peered at him with soft, pleading eyes.
“Henry, we were the last real generation of artificial insemination. What happened to all the oocytes and sperm banks of pre-virus subjects? We should have had millions of viable oocytes, enough to repopulate a city to work for solutions in repopulating the Earth, or at the very least to rebuild a space program and get off this cursed planet and start again in a virus free environment. What happened? Why was that option taken away from us? Why were we the last gener
ation of the in-vitro fertilization on this world? Why is our generation the last generation of intelligent human beings!?”
Uric stumbled with his answer. He hadn’t expected so much insight from her and was not prepared to engage her thoughts. He was tired. Very tired. The only desire he had was to leave the planet. He didn’t even fully comprehend why he remained at her side. It was the end. The victory, however, was so hollow. Perhaps, that’s why he remained. Perhaps, that was why he couldn’t find it in himself to leave. Something was not quite right. He was not at peace.
“Well, the sperm banks, uhm, they… they are mostly still intact. The oocytes banks were less to start off with and the major one burnt down while another had an unfortunate accident… and… Brenda, really, I don’t understand why we are even discussing this at this moment.”
She remained silent as her head turned towards the shut window. Henry was right. She could see a fog clearly come up the window pane. New York was in its dying throes. In a certain way, she was fortunate to have lived and seen the world with her sanity intact.
She had been one of the privileged ones. She represented the lucky three percent of the population whose pineal gland had been spared by the virus even if it had made no exception to her reproductive system. There was not one woman on the planet capable of producing a normal, healthy human child anymore. She turned her head back to Uric. There was fire in her eyes now, Uric thought.
“Henry, you know I don’t believe in God and you know I don’t think nature can be good or bad, intelligent or dumb. It just happens and it happens in such a way that it appears organized to any sentient being that is able to observe nature itself at work. Biology and biochemistry has its rules and I have a feeling that this virus is not playing within these rules. This virus is impervious to anything of this world. It is too perfect Henry, too… organized… almost as if it has an intelligence of its own. If I were to write a protocol for death, this is the only procedure I can think of that could have fooled mankind into extinction.”
“What are you saying?” asked Uric cautiously with a timid voice.
She looked at him straight in the eyes. “That this is an attack. We have been attacked, Henry. By whom, I don’t know. I don’t think it is of this world. I think something alien has attacked us – an alien intelligence.”
A certain pride filled Uric even if he knew it was totally inappropriate at that moment. Uric opened his lips. For the first time ever in his career of a Great Organizer, his mind wavered, vacillating between the unspeakable and the unbearable. Could he speak his mind to Brenda? Could he bear to have the guilt, yes the guilt of a whole race on his conscience forever, even if it was not an intelligent species?
Or did he need forgiveness?
***
The doctor took a step back, frowning. He blinked hard a few times as if trying to make the scene in front of his eyes disappear.
“You say that you were with her the whole time?”
Uric nodded.
“And you have no idea why she died like this, one hour ahead of her time?”
Uric glanced at Brenda. Her eyes were bulging, her neck strained as if she was trying to push her head through the pillow away from him. Her lips were curled back into a snarl. Her face was stiff, frozen horribly into a twisted expression of repulsion and disgust.
Uric left the doctor in the room. He went directly to the car and drove a few miles through the thickening smoke. Within half an hour he was on the ship. A council member greeted him. He read Uric’s final report. Everything had proceeded as per plan. Order had been restored.
The council member told him that his plan was soon to become protocol, ‘Standard Operating Procedures for the Annihilation of Violent Non-Intelligent Species’, and would be taught at the highest level, that of the Great Organizer.
Then he asked Uric if he wanted a prolonged vacation after the unusual ordeal on Earth. Uric refused and worked for another three million years before retiring. He finally died at peace, grateful for never having seen his protocol used during his lifetime.
The End