The Fourth Layer

by Boyd Craven Jr

  FIXING THE WORLD book 1

  THE FOURTH LAYER

  is part of the WE’RE ONLY HUMAN universe.

  Whatever happens within it,

  (characters, situations, worlds, linked series)

  is copyrighted © by Boyd Craven Jr.

  Story by Boyd Craven Jr.

  Written by HL Macfarlane

  Contributing author, Boyd Craven Jr.

  Cover by Hristo Argirov Kovatliev

  Dedication

  For Scotland & America, for our right to good food, and in recognition of our homegrown science and ingenuity! There’s nothing we can’t overcome.

  Contents

  Previously

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Previously

  In the FEEDING THE WORLD series, the United States takes on China in a trade war. In order to become dominant as the world’s food supplier, government owned Walsanto Seeds develops an innovative line of genetically modified grain seed they call Plus. CornPlus, WheatPlus, OatPlus, and SoyPlus to name the biggest sellers. They grow twice as big, twice as fast and yield four times as much as their heirloom predecessors. The whole world embraces America’s new Feed The World initiative—until a problem is discovered. Somehow, the impossible happens, and the cocktail of genes that were added to make them grow like that, moves up the food chain.

  It begins with the chicken industry, then pork, beef and dairy follow. A brilliant forensic geneticist, Hannah Withers gets involved. Her research tells her that unless drastic measures are taken soon, mankind was next in line for Hybridization.

  In a display of incredible stupidity, the FDA refuses her request for human trials for a reversal procedure she invents. Because of that, a new race of humans are born—part plant, part human. Or should that read—new species? Hannah predicts mankind, the current species at least, will be extinct within 7-10 years if emergency measures are not implemented...and maybe even if they are!

  This story begins the second of ten linked series that collectively form the WE’RE ONLY HUMAN universe and is aptly titled FIXING THE WORLD. It’ll make perfect sense if you start reading right here, but I’ll bet if you like it, in between publishing dates here, you’ll go read the first 6 novellas for background. Oh yeah...they’re good too.

  Chapter 1

  South Carolina

  Hannah Withers’ Apartment

  “Well that was a bust,” Hannah muttered as she entered her dark apartment, locked the door behind her and threw her keys towards a bowl on the kitchen table. She missed the dish, however, and the keys went skittering across the plastic tabletop to land on the floor. Scowling, Hannah bent down to retrieve them and angrily slammed them into the bowl with unnecessary ferocity. The resultant clatter of metal against ceramic echoed all around her empty apartment.

  Like an angry ghost, she thought about the ugly sound. Although I don’t really believe that ghosts exist. There is certainly no way to scientifically quantify their existence, at any rate. And if I can’t verify their existence…well, that is, for all intents and purposes, the same as them not existing at all!

  Hannah sighed, collapsing onto the corner sofa she’d saved up four entire months of her PhD stipend to pay for, before she got rich. She couldn’t believe she was wasting time fighting with her keys and deliberating over the existence of ghosts considering how dire her life was right now—how dire everyone’s life was right now. But, then again, she couldn’t believe what she’d just spent her entire evening doing, either.

  The world was ending and Hannah Withers had gone on a date. She wondered if one of those things was responsible for the other.

  It hadn’t started off all that terrible as far as Hannah’s dates had gone so far. That wasn’t saying much.

  But it had gotten much, much worse.

  Hannah had met the guy in a vinyl store a few blocks from her apartment. His first name was Peter, but for the life of her Hannah could no longer remember his last name. He’d been looking at old records by The Cure and Bauhaus, so Hannah hadn’t had to pretend she wasn’t a Goth to her core. He’d watched as she’d silently judged his musical choices before finally asking if she would rather talk instead of staring. The two of them had gone to Hannah’s local café—The Three Shakes—where she had ordered her usual banana milkshake and Peter had ordered a coffee instead. He’d been genuinely interested in Hannah.

  But Hannah had screwed everything up, because she hadn’t listened to a word Peter had said. Hence why she couldn’t remember his surname. Peter had put up with Hannah’s apparent disinterest for eighty minutes—seventy minutes too long, Hannah had to admit—before suggesting they call it a night. It wasn’t even six in the evening.

  “I could hardly tell him I was preoccupied because everyone is doomed to grow sterile and die, huh, Blue?” Hannah told her Siamese fighting fish, who silently wiggled his shimmery blue-and-red fins from within his elaborate fish tank set-up beneath the living room window. He stared at her with beady eyes before retreating into the lower deck of a sunken ship. “Yeah, I know, if my life is going to be cut short then I should probably live it to its fullest, huh? You’re so wise, Blue.”

  A few months ago Hannah had been convinced she could reverse the effects of the terminator gene and other horrific DNA elements Walsanto had implanted into the genome of their CornPlus. It had been moving up through the food chain since its inception, slowly but surely impacting the animals that consumed it. But their bizarre, hybrid corn hadn’t just been turning farm animals green and sterilizing them; it had literally been changing their biology, too. It was a disaster happening in slow-motion, for once it affected the human population in a meaningful way, then life as we know it on planet earth would cease to exist. Already there had been Hybrid births—babies being born that were part plant, part human...and with growing frequency daily.

  Hannah had been the one to discover what was going on. The why and the how. She was intent upon being the one who undid all the damage, too. Only…

  Her attempts at a ‘cure’ had completely and utterly failed, so far. She’d been at a standstill for weeks now, ever since her viral transfection methods for reversing the Walsanto-induced hybridization had proven ineffective outside of straightforward in vitro studies. Hannah needed a new angle—a solution she hadn’t yet thought of. No viruses. No bacteria. No biological units whatsoever. Nothing she and her team had tried came even close to overpowering this monster.

  She needed to perform targeted gene therapy through other means.

  Looking outside the box was how Hannah had come across nanobots two weeks prior. She’d taken time off from the lab—something Dr. Greene had not approved of whatsoever—in order to lock herself up in her apartment to brainstorm. This afternoon had been Hannah’s first time outside for longer than a quick trip to the corner store for Walsanto-devoid food.

  “And what did I do?” Hannah muttered, running a finger beneath the faux-leather choker she wore around her neck in discomfort. “I wasted my time having a date. I have to focus. Focus, Hannah. You can do this!” She grabbed her laptop from where it lay, innocuous, on the coffee table, wrenching it open to reveal an Internet browser page containing no fewer than forty-three active tabs. “There’s gotta be something here that you can use...”

  Nano
bots had been used successfully in cats and dogs for targeted therapies before, but their documented uses within humans were much more rare. Hannah scanned the last article she’d read before deciding, earlier that day, that she really should get some fresh air. A group of scientists had integrated nanobots into human neural circuits as proof of concept that the therapy could be used to treat neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease. The basis of their method rested upon the oldest and most widespread form of plant symbiosis known to man. It was that word—symbiosis—that kept drawing Hannah to the article.

  She didn’t want anything so aggressive as to take over a subject’s body. Just something that would methodically work with a human, or animal’s body, to mechanically rid it of the genetic material introduced by Walsanto’s products, and then go away. And if this team had managed to prove such a system worked in principle, then…perhaps Hannah could do something to save the world, after all.

  A buzzing in the pocket of her leather jacket gave Hannah a start. But it was only her cell phone; she’d ignored the device for days now. She pulled the phone out of her pocket, thinking that it was probably Dr. Greene asking her if she was still alive for the seventh time. But it wasn’t her supervisor.

  It was her father.

  Hannah still struggled to wrap her head around the fact that Rusty Whitman—who worked directly for the President of the United States, no less—was her biological father. She wanted to be surprised that her mother had kept such a huge secret from her, but really, Hannah wasn’t, in the slightest. It was exactly the kind of manipulative thing her mother would do. The woman had never understood her daughter nor, Hannah suspected, ever cared much to try, which was precisely why Hannah no longer spoke to her.

  But still. Knowing she’d kept Hannah from her father all these years stung like hell.

  Hannah accepted Rusty’s call. “Hey…Rusty,” she answered, finding the word ‘dad’ wrong and uncomfortably twisted upon her tongue. “Sorry I missed your call the other day. I’ve been…preoccupied.”

  The man chuckled. “So Dr. Greene tells me. What big secret have you been sitting on for two weeks all alone in your apartment, Hannah? Not another article that definitely should not be written lest it accidentally escape into the public eye?”

  Hannah made a face for nobody but Blue the fish to see. She kicked off her shoes, setting into the corner of her sofa before replying, “As if I’d be so stupid. And I never intended to publish that exposé, Rusty. They found it on my laptop, and they saw that it was auto-published by accident. Remember?”

  “That’s beside the point and you know it. Please tell me you aren’t doing anything remotely like that again? I might not be able to drag you out of something like that again, Hannah. I only have so much influence, you know.”

  “I’m behaving myself, I swear,” she reassured him. Sighing, Hannah’s eyes darted back to her laptop screen for but a moment, before inspiration hit her. She sat straight up in her chair, brain whirring furiously as she thought about how to word her request. “Uh, so, Rusty, I’ve been researching alternative methods to viral transfection after I so royally failed with in vivo subjects—live animals—but, you know that, of course, because I told you about it. But just in case you somehow forgot—”

  “You’re rambling, Hannah,” Rusty cut in mildly. He wasn’t being unkind; Hannah often went off-topic and chased rabbit holes. It was one of the more apparent tell-tale signs that she had Asperger’s.

  She winced. “Sorry, sorry. Anyway. I’ve been looking into alternative therapies and I think I may have found a possibility.”

  “Which is…?”

  “Well,” she began. Hannah wished she was having the call over her mother’s ancient landline phone—one of those ones with a helical cord—simply so she could twist the cord around her fingers to distract herself from her own nervous excitement. “There have been these studies using nanobots in cats and dogs and, more recently, humans, to specifically target genes and neuronal pathways and other cool stuff. It’s basically a non-biological therapy for molecular problems. It’s working really well so far. Really promising.”

  Rusty chuckled; it was a dry, pleasant sound. Hannah liked hearing him laugh. “And let me guess: you want me to get you permission to conduct some experiments with these—what’d you call them? Nanobots?”

  Hannah nodded before remembering she was on the phone. “Yes. Please. I have a good feeling about this.”

  “You and Dr. Greene both had a good feeling about the virus thing and that failed.”

  “It didn’t fail in principle,” Hannah complained. “It just didn’t work inside cells, because the viruses we tried using all interacted with too many non-specific areas of the genome. The nanobots can’t do that, because they aren’t made of biological matter. And they’re far more programmable than a virus is.”

  “You know fine and well I have NO clue what you just said,” Rusty replied. There was a pause; Hannah could just imagine Rusty scratching the scruff that grew on his chin as he considered her request. When he sighed, Hannah knew she’d won him over. “Ah, hell, what do we have to lose? The entire planet is screwed if we don’t fix this. Okay, Hannah, I’ll fire your request over to the FDA. Can you email more of the specifics to me?”

  Hannah nodded at her phone again, followed by an enthusiastic, “Yes! Yes, of course! Thank you so much, Rusty.”

  “On one condition.”

  “And that’s…?”

  “Get back to the lab. Your supervisor is worried about you enough as it is. Don’t give Dr. Greene cause to go prematurely bald, will you? He’s a decent man.”

  Hannah giggled softly. “That would be funny to see.”

  “I don’t think he’d see it that way.”

  “I suppose not. Okay, Rusty, I’ll go back to work. I’ll send you everything you need to know as soon as I hang up the phone. Thank you so much for helping me out.”

  “Any time, kiddo.” A long pause. Hannah knew Rusty was careful not to treat her like his daughter and instead like a colleague, since Hannah had made no indication that she wanted their relationship to be anything more than that. But occasionally the man would slip up, and Hannah had to admit she didn’t mind it as much now, as she used to.

  Maybe one day I will call him dad, she mused.

  “Bye, Rusty,” Hannah said, just as the man himself said his goodbyes and hung up the phone. She was quick to fire him over an email as promised, after which Hannah sent Dr. Greene an apologetic text, promising she’d be back in the lab come Monday.

  “So what do I do with my weekend, Blue?” she asked her fish, who once more did nothing but swim around his tank in response. It wasn’t even seven in the evening on a Friday. Hannah could go no further with her research until Rusty got her the blessed FDA approval. Her two closest friends, Todd and Grace, had recently started dating and were away all weekend.

  Hannah browsed through her laptop for potential movies to watch, grinning like a maniac when she spotted the name of one of her favorite eighties horror classics. The plot was oddly appropriate to the current state of the world, too.

  Settling properly onto her sofa, Hannah wirelessly connected her laptop to her television and began watching The Fly.

  She could only hope reality never got as bad for the human race as it did for Jeff Goldblum’s character.

  Chapter 2

  South Carolina

  The Three Shakes Milkshake Bar

  Hannah found herself sitting at a table outside The Three Shakes on Sunday afternoon, decidedly at a loss for what to do with herself. Her weekend movie marathon had bored her much earlier than she’d anticipated—it just wasn’t the same to watch eighties horror films without her friends—and so Hannah ventured outside to try and clear her head.

  She doubted she’d ever have a clear head again.

  Hannah tapped her left foot over and over again against the paved outdoor terrace of The Three Shakes, the heavy sole of her Doc Martens thudding loudly on
the gray stone. Whenever she became aware that she was doing so she forced herself to stop, but that only caused Hannah to, instead, chew the end of her pen or her thumbnail or scratch her arm in agitation. They were her go-to nervous tics, and right now she was far past nervous.

  When will Rusty get back to me? Hannah wondered, distractedly thanking the barista when she came out to give her an extra-large banana shake. Though she’d only just had one on Friday on her failed date, Hannah couldn’t contain her cravings for another one. The Three Shakes was a local café, which sourced its milk from grass fed local cattle that had never been near a Walsanto product their entire lives, and still tested every batch before using it in their ice cream products. That meant Hannah could confidently drink milkshake after milkshake without worry about what she was putting into her pale-skinned, slightly underfed, tattooed body.

  “Of course I’m underfed,” Hannah muttered to herself, garnering a suspicious look from the couple sitting at the next table over, “I’m too damn scared to eat anything these days without testing it first.”

  She wondered how long it would be before even The Three Shakes was affected by the Hybridization Virus somehow. Maybe the word virus will confuse people, as it’s not the kind of virus that comes to mind in the average person. Sigh.

  She didn’t want to dwell upon it for long, though; because once small, local farms were destroyed, it spelled disaster for everyone. She didn’t like to even think about that.

  Hannah blew bubbles into her milkshake through the comically bendy straw she’d been given to drink it from. She was currently whiling away her time drawing a version of the hybrid chickens from which she’d originally worked out Walsanto’s nefarious plot. Larger and leaner than ordinary chickens. No feathers. Green-skinned. Had a new ability to photosynthesize sunlight into energy. Faster and stronger...and one hundred percent sterile.