Department 19, The Rising, and Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  “A cure for vampirism,” answered Professor Talbot. “What else?”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “We certainly think so.”

  “But how?”

  “Using a self-replicating, DNA-authoring, genetically engineered virus.”

  “What?”

  Talbot smiled again, more openly this time, and led Jamie towards the huge hologram double helix. They stopped in front of it, and Jamie watched the impossibly complex design rotate slowly as the Professor began to talk.

  “OK,” said Talbot. “Tell me how the condition that we refer to as vampirism is transferred.”

  “By biting,” answered Jamie. “If a vampire bites you, and you don’t die, you turn.”

  “That’s right. But can you tell me what makes you turn?”

  Jamie shook his head.

  “Exactly,” continued Talbot. “Nor would I expect you to; there are only a handful of people in the world who really understand the process. But in the simplest terms, this is what happens when a vampire bites you. Their fangs are coated with a fluid, a unique type of plasma that is passed into your bloodstream in the act of biting. This fluid contains a virus, unlike any other that occurs in the natural world. For one thing, it’s remarkably aggressive; it replicates itself millions of times over, spreading through your blood until it infects every cell in your body. You understand what a cell is, yes?”

  “I’m not stupid,” replied Jamie, casting a hard look in the Professor’s direction. Talbot smiled, and continued.

  “This aggressiveness is why there is such a small window in which the process can be stopped. But it is possible; the virus is aggressive, and fast-acting, but short-lived. If blood is transfused into the victim faster than the virus is able to multiply, it burns out within a few hours, and the turn doesn’t take place. But if that doesn’t happen, or happens too slowly, the virus will multiply, and multiply, and multiply, until it reaches saturation. And then the turn begins in earnest.”

  Talbot gestured in the direction of the hologram.

  “This is a strand of human DNA,” he said. “Roughly twenty-three thousand genes arranged around twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. These genes contain the blueprint for building, and then maintaining, the systems that make up a human being. How they do this is too complicated for me to explain to you now, so just understand that a combination of genes accounts for why you look the way you do, why you are as tall as you are, why your eyes are blue rather than green. This information is coded into every single cell in your body, ready to be passed on to your children, and your grandchildren. Are you with me so far?”

  “I understand,” said Jamie, his eyes fixed on the spinning hologram.

  “Good,” said Talbot. “The virus that is passed on to the victim during a vampire attack is not what gives them their superhuman abilities. The virus is merely the agent of that process. Once it has achieved saturation, the virus begins to alter parts of the victim’s DNA, essentially overwriting the existing code. This new code, which is rapidly copied to every cell in the victim’s body, is what causes the turn. It’s what makes vampires.”

  “Hang on,” said Jamie, his brow furrowing. “If you change my DNA, does that mean I change too? Like, physically? I thought it would just mean I passed the new code on to my kids?”

  Talbot stared at Jamie, admiration on his face.

  “Bravo,” he said. “There are men and women a lot older than you who fail to understand that. You’re absolutely right; under normal circumstances, changing an organism’s DNA would not result in physical changes to the organism in question. There are specific instances in which it is possible; there is a gene therapy treatment for cystic fibrosis sufferers that involves them inhaling a genetically engineered aerosol that essentially fixes some of the broken cells in their lungs, but that is a very specific case, dealing with only a tiny, tiny number of cells. Ordinarily, a change to the DNA would do nothing.”

  “That’s why the vampire virus is different, isn’t it?” said Jamie. “Because it changes people, right away.”

  “Exactly,” replied Talbot. “The new DNA code that the virus writes into the victim’s cells has a kind of trigger within it, an update button, if you like. Once the code is copied across all the cells, the new DNA acts upon the body, changing it physically, giving the victim their strength and speed, and their compulsion to feed. It is absolutely unique. And the process is irreversible. For now at least.”

  “And that’s what you’re trying to undo?” asked Jamie. “The changes that are made to the DNA?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How? How would you even attempt something like that?”

  Talbot waved his arm towards the bank of silver cabinets that stood along one of the walls of the Lazarus Project.

  “Those machines are gene sequencers,” he replied. “Powered by the largest supercomputer array in the world. We’re mapping the altered DNA, isolating the new code that the vampire virus writes into each cell. Once that process is complete, the plan is to engineer a counter virus that will go through an infected system, delete the new code and return the victim’s DNA back to its original state.”

  “Why can’t we do that now?” asked Jamie.

  “As I already told you, there are approximately twenty-three thousand genes in a strand of human DNA. That in itself might not sound like many, but you can take my word that it is. And there is a far bigger obstacle in the way: the DNA of every single person on earth is unique. Deleting the vampire viral code from the DNA is not the difficult bit – the difficult bit is restoring the code that the virus has deleted. There is no all-purpose code we can write in once the vampire code is gone; the code that would have been overwritten in your cells is completely different to the code that would have been overwritten in mine.”

  “So how can you make it work?”

  “The virus we’re designing is like a tiny biological supercomputer. It analyses each cell as it replicates through the body, deletes the vampire code it has been programmed to recognise and then, using incredibly sophisticated chemical analysis of the proteins in the surrounding cells, rewrites the empty sections of the code. Once it has done that for every cell in a system, it uses the same trigger as the vampire virus, an amino acid that we’ve been able to isolate and map, and the victim’s system is returned to normal, all traces of vampirism gone from their body.”

  “That sounds impossible.”

  “Conventional wisdom would tell you that it is. But we’ve made developments and breakthroughs in this lab that are generations beyond the genetic work being done out in the world, in even the most highly resourced research facilities. What you see around you, Jamie, is the most ambitious, most complicated and most expensive science project ever conducted. And it’s what we believe will eventually bring an end to the curse of vampirism.”

  “How long?” asked Jamie, his voice trembling. “How long until you can make this work?”

  How long until I can tell my mum and Larissa that they’re going to be all right?

  “I don’t know,” said Talbot. Jamie opened his mouth to voice his dismay, but Talbot raised a hand and cut him off. “I understand your agitation, really I do. And I can tell you, honestly, that the progress we’ve made is staggering. But I also have to tell you, with equal honesty, that it could be years before we have a workable vaccine.”

  “Years?” said Jamie, his heart sinking in his chest.

  “It could be less,” said Talbot, forcing a smile that was clearly meant to be encouraging. “It could be a year, or even a matter of months. But we aren’t going to be able to cure your mother tomorrow, much as I’d like to.”

  “But we will be able to cure her?” Jamie could hear the desperate pleading in his voice as he asked the question. “One day? That’s what you’re saying, right?”

  Talbot looked at him solemnly.

  “Perhaps I was wrong to bring you down here,” he said, softly. “I didn’t mean to get your hop
es up. I’m sorry.”

  “You weren’t wrong,” said Jamie. “Really you weren’t. It’s better knowing that someone is working on a cure, even if it might take a while. I’m not a child; I didn’t expect you to be able to cure her tomorrow. But if you’re saying there’s a chance you might be able to cure her in the future, then that’s something I’m grateful to know.”

  “Well,” said Talbot, a smile on his face, “in that case, I’m glad.”

  He walked away from the hologram, and Jamie followed him across the wide room. The Lazarus Project staff, the majority of whom had stopped what they were doing to watch the conversation between Jamie and Talbot, returned their attention to their work, although several of them nodded and smiled at Jamie as he passed their desks. Talbot led Jamie round the DNA hologram and towards the row of gene sequencers, passing by the heavy airlock door at the back of the room.

  Jamie slowed as they passed it. There was a rectangular window set at eye level in the thick white metal but, frustratingly, he could see nothing through the small block of glass. Talbot noticed that the teenager had dropped back, and turned to him.

  “Everything OK?” he asked.

  Jamie blushed slightly. “Yeah,” he replied. “Sorry. I was just wondering…”

  “What’s behind the door?”

  “Right.”

  “It’s OK,” said Talbot. “That’s where we keep the research subjects.”

  “You mean the vampires we’ve been catching for you?”

  “That’s right. They need to be isolated from any viruses or bacteria the staff or Operators might be carrying, and they need to be contained. They’re still vampires.”

  “My squad brought two in yesterday,” said Jamie, a flicker of pride on his face.

  “Of course,” said Talbot. “Mr Connors and his daughter. Very useful from a genetic perspective, two members of the same family.”

  “Are they doing OK?” asked Jamie. “They were really scared when we caught them.”

  “They’re fine,” replied the Professor. “We treat all our subjects extremely well.”

  “Can I see them?”

  “I’m afraid not,” replied Talbot. “The sterilisation procedure to access the clean room takes almost forty minutes to complete, and I can’t spare any of my staff to take you through it. I’m sorry.”

  Jamie stared at the airlock door, and realised he wanted to go through it incredibly badly. It was partly the fact that he had been told he was not allowed to, but it was also the idea that behind the heavy white door lay the key to finding the cure that Talbot had described to him, a key that he was, at least in part, helping to provide.

  But he could wait.

  He had no intention of pushing his luck with Professor Talbot, who had already demonstrated enormous trust by allowing him even this far into the Lazarus Project. He resumed his course towards the gene sequencers, and after a momentary pause, Talbot joined him.

  “So how long have you been working on this?” he asked, as Talbot began to check the readings on the front of the machines. “How long have you all been down here?”

  “I’ve been working on a variation of this project for most of my adult life,” replied Talbot. He took a small console from his pocket, and entered a series of numbers into a spreadsheet. “I was recruited into Department 19 a year ago, and we accelerated our efforts after Dracula’s remains were lost. But my work was already well under way before then; I worked with Francis Collins on the Human Genome Project in Maryland, then on viral engineering at the Strangeways lab in Cambridge, and then I got the opportunity to continue my work down here.”

  “Opportunity?” asked Jamie, grinning. He knew full well that it would have been made clear to the Professor that refusing the offer was not a realistic option.

  “I suppose it was really more of an instruction,” replied Talbot, smiling back. “But not one I was reluctant to follow, especially once the scale of the project was made clear to me: complete authority to recruit staff, a computer array more powerful than any in the world, a basically limitless budget and the challenge to do something that would save thousands of lives. Who could have turned that down?”

  “Obviously not you,” said Jamie.

  “Obviously.”

  They moved down the line of gene sequencers, Talbot taking readings from each one in turn.

  “So who are all these people?” Jamie asked, nodding towards the men and women hunched over their desks.

  “Geneticists,” replied Talbot, without looking round. “Virologists. Doctors. All hired from the best research institutes around the world. They’re the finest minds in their fields.”

  Jamie stared at the Lazarus Project staff; there was a focused intensity in the room, a feeling of communal genius bent to a single purpose. Each of the men and women in the white coats appeared to be simultaneously in a world of their own and part of a greater organism, like super-intelligent bees in a hive. He knew he could never, ever, in a thousand years, understand the work they were doing, but the thought did not make him feel inadequate. Instead, all he felt was admiration.

  Talbot straightened up, regarding Jamie with a warm smile.

  “Is there anything else I can show you?” he asked. “Anything else you want to know? If not, I should probably be getting back to work.”

  Jamie was about to say no, when a thought suddenly leapt into his mind, and he blushed a deep, dark red.

  “What is it?” asked Talbot.

  Oh God. Can I? I haven’t turned, so it must be safe. But still.

  “If a human being,” he said, cautiously, “were to, er, kiss a vampire? That would be risky, right?”

  Talbot gave him a long look, then broke into a laugh.

  “Speaking hypothetically,” he replied. “I assume we are speaking hypothetically, Mr Carpenter?”

  “Of course,” said Jamie, his face burning.

  “Of course. Well, in that hypothetical situation, the human would be quite safe as long as the vampire in question kept his or her fangs withdrawn. The virus that causes the turn doesn’t exist anywhere else, so the risk of infection would be negligible.”

  “Right,” said Jamie. “That’s good to know.”

  “Hmm,” said Talbot. “I’m sure it is.” He grinned broadly at Jamie, then placed a hand on his back and led him towards the door. “If you have any other questions,” he continued, “or if you just want someone to talk to, you know your way down here. OK?”

  “I understand,” said Jamie. “Thank you. Really.”

  “You’re welcome,” replied Talbot. He opened the door, and Jamie stepped through it and back into the corridor of Level F. As Talbot swung the door closed, Jamie saw a flicker of something else pass across the Professor’s face, as though he wanted to say something else, but was either unable to do so, or decided against it. Then the door thudded into place, shutting Jamie out.

  35

  HOPE IS A DANGEROUS THING

  TODAY

  “I have secrets,” said Jamie, slowly. “But I have no intention of sharing them with you.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to,” said Valentin. “But I can see on your face that there is something you want to say. What is it?”

  Jamie was impressed, despite himself; the old vampire’s powers of observation were remarkable. “There is something,” he admitted. “Last year, when we were searching for my mother, we visited a place called Valhalla. Have you heard of it?”

  Valentin nodded. “The commune in the north,” he said. “Vampires holding hands and singing songs and denying what they are.”

  “OK,” said Jamie. “It was founded by a man called Grey, who is supposed to be the oldest British vampire. It was him who turned Larissa; she was one of a lot of teenage girls he attacked over the years, all while he was preaching peace and love. He was cast out of Valhalla when his followers found out what he’d done, but before he went, he told me something, something he thought was why we were there in the first place. Something
about Dracula.”

  Valentin said nothing, but he narrowed his eyes slightly as he waited for Jamie to continue.

  “He told me that there was only one way to destroy Dracula for good, and that it had to do with the blood of his first victim, the first person he ever turned. Frankenstein knew the legend, and asked him why he was bothering to tell us because even if it was true, everyone knew that Valeri was the first human being Dracula ever turned, and he would never allow himself to be used to destroy his master. But Grey told us that he had once been at a party thrown by you, where you had told him that the accepted story might not be the true story. Do you remember that?”

  A smile crept across Valentin’s face.

  “I do,” he said. “We were on the roof of my home in Manhattan, waiting for the sun to come up. I don’t believe he was calling himself Grey at the time, although I can’t remember what name he was using. I liked him; he was a regular fixture in New York that summer.”

  “So you did tell him that there was more to the story than people think?” asked Jamie. “He was telling the truth?”

  “He was,” said Valentin. “I told him that my brother is not quite so important to the legend of Dracula as most people believe, and certainly not as important as Valeri would like to think. But if you’re going to ask me for more details, I should warn you now that I don’t know them.”

  Jamie’s heart sank. “What do you mean, you don’t know them?” he asked.

  “I mean, I don’t know them. I don’t know for sure that I’m right; perhaps Valeri is the key to my former master’s immortality. But over the years, more years than you can possibly imagine, things were said, or not said, and I came to the conclusion that there was more to the story of Dracula’s transformation than we knew. Put simply, I don’t believe my brother was the first victim.”

  “Did Dracula ever say that?” asked Jamie. “Did you ever ask him directly?”

  Valentin laughed.

  “I never asked him anything directly, Jamie,” he replied. “He was our master, our Prince, our second father. He demanded nothing less than utter obedience, utter subservience, and that was what we gave him. He told us the story of his rebirth only once, and what he said was that after he was turned in the forest outside Budapest, he came straight back to the battlefield to find us. When he did so, he turned Valeri, then Alexandru, and then finally myself. He made no mention of any others.”