Enhanced

by Cosca, Paul

  Here, I feel like a monster in a movie. Like Frankenstein. They brought him back to life and everyone hated him. He just wanted to live a normal life, but they all knew he was a freak. And they hated him because he was different. That’s how it is now. I don’t even think I could go home after all this. I don’t think I want the people I grew up with to know how different I am now.

  I know this sounds crazy, but part of me hopes I get to Germany and die over there. Dying would just be so much easier than trying to figure out what to do with myself now.

  April 29th, 2000

  Today’s journey has been a little bumpier than I anticipated. My first flight took me to Minneapolis. The flight was early, and the man sitting next to me reeked of last night’s booze, but at least the going was smooth. In searching for my connecting flight, I found Minneapolis Airport a little lacking in user friendliness; I quite nearly missed boarding because of a slow tram between terminals. I thought getting on my second flight would mean I had gone through the worst of it, but the turbulent air surrounding the Rockies thought differently.

  I don’t think the man sitting next to me appreciated me filling two airsickness bags with this morning’s breakfast. I’m quite certain the flight attendant who had to throw the bags away didn’t appreciate it either. Finally, we landed in the college town of Missoula, Montana and the Rockies decided my day just wasn’t bad enough.

  Having not seen snow outside my apartment in a month, I was flabbergasted to walk out of the airport and find myself in a foot of the stuff. Now the sporty little car I rented for the day seemed a little underdressed. However it has been my valiant steed today as we braved the mushy snow together, and I found my way to the University of Montana.

  Dr. Lillian Fole is a comely but obviously overworked woman. Her long brown hair is pulled back tightly into a ponytail that trails down the back of her lab coat. The lab coat is not for show, as we are sitting in the research lab that doubles as her office. The grad students that work as her research assistants (they are all getting their Doctor of Pharmacy degrees here at the university) have all gone to lunch. They offered to get me something, but I don’t know if my stomach can quite handle any food. Though I’m glad to be on solid ground, I’m still feeling a little green. And I think it shows.

  DR. FOLE: I’m sorry about the weather. I didn’t cause it or anything, obviously, but it definitely wasn’t this way last week. Have you been to Montana before?

  I let her know this is my first time in the state.

  Ah, that’s too bad. Everyone just thinks it’s all snow and ice up here,

  like we’re at the north pole. But it can be really beautiful up here. Very green and...fresh, I guess. And we’d had a couple weeks of real sunny weather. I even planted a few flowers. But two days ago we got this storm that just dumped buckets of snow. I think my flowers are shot. It’s even worse up in Great Falls, so feel lucky you didn’t try flying in there.

  Anyway, thank you for coming up here. You probably could have asked all kinds of people for an explanation of the RGR virus, but I really appreciate you making the trip. Pharmaceutical research isn’t exactly a glamorous job. I only teach one class this semester: a medical microbiology class at 8am. Needless to say, there aren’t a whole lot of interested parties that early in the morning. Heck, that includes me, too. My real work right now is here in this lab. And even though the big successes that might come could be years or even a decade away, it’s what I’m passionate about. Yes, passionate. I know, people don’t usually associate science with passion, but it’s true. Science has its own passion. The hunt for clues, the unraveling of mysteries. So it’s nice to share all this with someone who isn’t trying to nap off a hangover as I lecture about mitosis.

  So...you want the nuts and bolts of the RGR virus, huh? Well, I could go into some pretty extreme detail, but I get the feeling the only people who’d want to read that are grad students, so let’s try for the big picture.

  The basic function of the RGR virus is right there in the name. Retroactive Genetic Remapping. It’s a bit of a misnomer these days, but it tells the story well enough. I know that in the first half of the 20th century, the military had a pretty big hand in giving adults the virus. And in that case, it does exactly what the name implies. The virus goes through the body and takes apart sections of DNA, replacing those bits with...well, other bits. For those who get it after birth, it really remaps some of the structure that makes up who you are. Retroactive Genetic Remapping. Now, if the virus is introduced in utero it’s a different story, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

  For all the progress we’ve made in virology, we still don’t precisely understand how the mechanics of the RGR virus function. We don’t know how it chooses where to go or why one person who has the virus will have a completely different reaction than another person who gets it, even if the sample is from the same strain. It appears that the randomization comes after the virus is in the new host, which makes it incredibly difficult to study. One person who gets the virus might find their eye color changes. Another person might end up with spider veins in one of their legs. A third person might get cancer, which of course is just a big group of changed cells. If you’ve got random mutations happening in the body, cancer is going to crop up a lot.

  But one of the most interesting and misunderstood aspects of the virus is the fact that somewhere around half of the people who have it don’t show any changes at all. For a long time, it was assumed that these people were either immune to the virus or just carriers. But that’s not true at all. They just didn’t understand how resilient the human body is.

  When an embryo begins development, it obviously gets genetic information from both parents. However, the information that is received isn’t exact. We’re not clones, after all. And often there are strong differences between parents and children. This is because as DNA is formed in the embryo, little changes occur. There is a natural randomization that occurs as development takes place, then of course there are mutations. Most of these are what we call point mutations, which is where just one little bit of the code is changed. And there is so much redundancy in our genetic structure that these point mutations go completely unnoticed. If there weren’t these small mutations, then we as a species, having evolved from a common ancestor, would look almost identical.

  So, because we’ve got all this genetic redundancy, someone could be positive for the virus, but believe they are not because they’ve seen no alterations to their biology. Not knowing they are in fact positive, they could

  act in a way that unknowingly puts others at risk for exposure.

  Now that’s adults. But what about when those people have children? It wasn’t until the 60s that we could say conclusively that the RGR virus was passed down from mother to child. When an embryo in development is exposed to the virus, the virus has a chance to remap genetic code as it is being written. The potential for biological alterations, both positive and negative, is huge. Far greater than for any adult exposed to the virus. Unfortunately, what we find is that the alterations can often form into severe, unfixable birth defects, if the fetus even makes it to the end of gestation. What we see are a wide swath of phenotypes that are, quite simply, not compatible with life.

  Of course, that isn’t always true. There are plenty of times where development occurs normally, or even the small percentage of instances where what we might call a “positive” alteration occurs. But when you have miscarriage rates as high as sixty-five percent, like what was shown in the Parker and Houser study, something has to be done. Something needs fixing.

  I ask Dr. Fole about the critics within the Enhanced community that have accused some researchers of trying to find a “cure” for that section of the population.

  I’ve heard that, obviously. And It’s a very sensitive subject. I completely see where they are coming from. The RGR virus isn’t just a virus. It’s forged a community out there, and I don’t want to do anything to change that. I can’t speak for everyon
e doing research, but I’m not doing eugenics over here. I’m just trying to help raise the birth rate. Can you imagine how it would feel to be told that you and your partner are both perfectly healthy, but have less than a coin flip of a chance of having a healthy child? How many failed pregnancies can someone go through before they just give up? If anything, I’m trying to help build the Enhanced community, not the other way around.

  As I was getting my PhD, I did a rotation at a hospital with a large

  research facility. The research lab was my home, but I spent a lot of time down at the neonatal ward. I would go down there and look through the charts, since studying the RGR virus was my doctoral thesis, and the kinds of malformations that those poor children had were terrible. You could just look at them and know that their chances of growing up to be healthy adults were minimal at best. For every Enhanced baby that went home with their parents right away, it felt like there were two more laying there, waiting to die. So no, I certainly don’t hate the Enhanced. And no, I don’t want to eradicate them. What I want is to give more kids a decent shot at life.

  February 3rd, 1995

  If you needed a working definition for “warm and cozy”, the inside of Kevin White’s home would work just fine. Though the decor has obviously seen a woman’s touch, the one story house on the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska features furniture made with dark wood and deep colors. I can see the frost and snow throwing itself against the window, but the living room is perfectly warm thanks to a crackling fire.

  Kevin’s nurse is just getting done checking on him as I get settled in. Though he still gets around his house, he has late stage colon cancer, and the care he is getting is for hospice. I hate feeling like I do, but being met with mortality like that is always troubling for me. I do my best not to let it show. It helps that Kevin is spirited and happy, joking with his nurse as she makes sure he has everything he needs. When she leaves, his demeanor changes a little. A little more of the weariness shows through. He settles into his chair as I start my recorder. We each sip mugs of hot chocolate, and as I take my first sip I realize it’s spiked with a little Bailey’s. It is certainly not an unwelcome surprise.

  KEVIN: She’s got a hell of a hard job, Marcy does. That’s my nurse. Hell of a hard job. I bet most of the old farts she has to take care of don’t give two shits about being nice to her. But being nice is easy. Doing what she does, taking care of us folks on borrowed time, that’s gotta be hard.

  But truth be told, I’m not feeling too bad about it all. I’ve seen enough in my life that I’m not too scared of what might come after. The way I see it, I should have been dead over fifty years ago. Most of my life has been on borrowed time, so this isn’t as big a deal as it might be to...to someone else. Someone who didn’t go through all that.

  I’m very proud to say I was in the 29th infantry division in 1944. I’ve got one of those ball caps with my division on it that all the old farts like to wear. I was with the 29th, and all of us ended up in that big mess they call Omaha beach. D-Day, though I don’t think we called it that back then. Hell, I don’t remember what we called it. I just remember all of us smoking a lot and

  wondering what the hell they were getting us into.

  The weather was really terrible. All rain and wind. Not so bad if you’re out for a walk, but bad enough if you’re trying to get across the English Channel on a big metal raft. A lot of guys got seasick. Throwing up right over the side of the big people carriers. And all the while the sea is coming up right over the sides, like it wanted to swallow us up. We did our best to bail it out with our helmets. The war might have turned out differently if the whole damn fleet had just sunk off the coast of England. We finally made it across, but when the door opened and I knew it was time to get out, I almost quit right there.

  I know they’d told us about it. I guess I should have expected it, but I wasn’t looking at the beach. We were still in the damn channel. I saw guys walking with water up to their necks trying to get to the shoreline. And I am not ashamed to say that I was far more afraid of drowning than I was of being shot. But I followed everyone else, and we all went off like lemmings.

  Have you ever tried running on the beach? That’s a tough go even in sneakers and shorts. You add in 50 pounds of gear and a gun that will croak if it gets wet, and it’s just a disaster. The smoke was so bad you could hardly see where the beach started. But we trudged along, hoping we didn’t look like the sitting ducks we really were.

  Saw some guys go down on the way to the beach. Some were shot and killed right there. Some got hit and drowned when they couldn’t get the strength to stand again. In both cases I wanted to reach down and drag guys with me, but you just couldn’t. Not in the water like that. You had to get to shore. You had to get out, because you’d be no good to anyone dead. Somehow I made it to the beach and dropped behind the first bit of cover I could find.

  We had guys digging trenches wherever they could, which is both simple and difficult when you’re in sand. Others of us were hiding behind

  rocks and concrete barricades the Nazis had put up. They did a pretty crummy job of blocking up the beach, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t fortified further on. Hell, I’d have rather tried to sneak into Fort Knox. Aside from all the gunner nests up on the cliffs above us, they had these great big concrete bunkers. And on the top of those were turrets like on the top of tanks. That place was fortified, all right. But what we had were numbers. And we kept throwing ourselves against it all like waves crashing on the shore.

  I wish I had made it longer without getting hurt, but you just can’t predict that kind of thing. I laid down some fire for one of my buddies as he moved from one piece of cover to another, then it was my turn to go. I was just about to dive back under cover when I felt it. It felt like a bad bee sting at first. But then the whole leg gave out on me and I knew it was bad. There was blood everywhere. I gave myself a second or two to panic, then got myself under control and called for a medic. I was getting real weak just after a minute or two.

  It’s amazing he heard me at all. I saw him pop up out of cover maybe forty yards away and head toward me. I felt like I had a guardian angel coming for me right then. And then every little bit of hope I had went right to hell. I didn’t see where the shot came from, and I know that medic didn’t see it. All I saw was a big splatter of blood as a bullet ripped right through his throat. He fell straight down, face down in the sand. I heard my buddies calling for another medic, but I was just looking at this poor dead boy. Some...some Nazi bastard had not only killed him, but had killed me right along with him. I looked down, and my own blood was spreading farther out. A couple more minutes and I was going to be a goner.

  When I looked back up, I thought maybe I’d died or gone crazy or something. Because there was that dead medic, pushing himself up from the sand. And it wasn’t like he’d just tripped and fallen. The blood from his neck was all over his shirt and his face, but the wounds were totally gone.

  As he ran up me, he coughed up a little sand and blood. I almost started busting up laughing, even though it wasn’t funny. My brain couldn’t even process what I was seeing. See, he had to cough up the sand because it had gotten in the hole that had just been in his throat. That...my brain just couldn’t work around that. That’s not something that was supposed to be real. But it was. He was real, and he was silently fixing up my leg. None of us said a word. He finished his work, gave me a nod, and hopped out to go fix someone else.

  I understand it now. I’ve seen plenty of things from then till now that challenged what I thought reality was all about. So I get it. But plenty of men out there, me included, we saw things that day on the beach that could barely be believed. I saw someone climb right up a sheer cliff like a monkey to capture a gunner nest. I saw a soldier get on top of one of those turrets and bend the barrel in half with his bare hands. And I watched a man set the world around him on fire just by touching it.

  Even though I can explain what I saw now...at least a l
ittle...it doesn’t change the fact that a small group of soldiers rallied us all that day. If they could do the impossible, then we could too. And we did. Damn the odds, we captured the beach and went on to capture the whole damn territory. We might have done it without those Enhanced boys, but I owe my life to them being there.

  September 20th, 1995

  The nursing home I am visiting today in Ripley, West Virginia is so lovely I almost forget what the purpose of the building is for. I am told that Forest Glen Retirement Community began life as a mansion with an expansive acreage. Now it has a few more buildings, apartments for assisted living, and the main house reserved for those who require around the clock care. My interview subject lives in the main house.

  Every window in the house features a spectacular view of the lush, green forests that surround the building. Whatever previous notions I had about the state of West Virginia are replaced by the sheer greenness of it all. By all accounts, it’s a lovely place to be. Of course many of the residents here, like those in nursing homes all across the country, have found themselves in circumstances where they have no choice but to sacrifice independence for the security of having medical staff on hand. Ronald Groves is such a person.

  Ronald has suffered a lifetime of medical complications due to his work with the Enhanced Special Operations Division in WWII. His room in Forest Glen is cozy and the view is great, but it is filled with a strong smell of medicines and antiseptics. It is not a comfortable smell.