The God Organ

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  Maybe Audrey was right, after all. Maybe they would figure it all out. They’d be okay.

  When the train slowed at his stop, he got off as another crowd pushed its way on. He blinked at the bright LED lights that illuminated the station as he walked down to street level and strode toward the emerald-green front of the LyfeGen building.

  Crowds of people milled about the street and sidewalks. A haphazard cadre of protesters paced around as a contingency of security guards prevented them from completely blocking off the front driveway.

  Matthew couldn’t help smiling at the antiquated poster board and marker signs amongst the projected images and flashy signs of comm card holos carried by the crowds. He figured the poster board protesters were probably just the usual crowd of technology doomsayers who refused to resort to comm cards and projections. Then again, maybe they couldn’t afford comm cards and the service plans—maybe they were unemployed. Fear struck him again as he worried that he could be joining that crowd.

  As he made his way past the barricade and flashed his comm card for a LyfeGen security-guard scan, Matthew glanced back at the crowd. Indeed, there were the usual signs denouncing the promises of healthcare technology and blindly following scientists into a dystopian future. Several projections referred to the Sustain using its media-created designation: “The God Organ.”

  The projections scrolling in the air read, “Humans should not pretend to be God. We do not have the right to destroy or create life. Do not allow these abominable creations to infect the temple of your body. Joel Cobb is dead and gone to hell.” Matthew had read about the discontent of some religious organizations with regard to the Sustain, but had never experienced it firsthand. Now, the groups appeared emboldened by the morning’s news.

  As he entered the lobby, he wondered how many of the protesters were actually people crowding the streets and how many were just projections organized by a relay of comm cards and illuminations. Regardless, he no longer needed the news streams to tell him people were incensed by Joel Cobb’s demise.

  Matthew walked past the water fountain and into an open elevator. Another man stepped in beside him.

  “Crazy, isn’t it?”

  Matthew nodded.

  A woman joined them and flashed a smile.

  Matthew recognized her. He knew her first name was Jacqueline and that she ran one of the main regulations labs that validated Sustain-related projects for FDA approval. More importantly, he recognized her icy blue eyes, high cheekbones, and deep brown hair. She wore a trim suit dress with a longish skirt that highlighted her toned calves. His desire for her burned each time he saw her, like a ridiculous high school crush. He couldn’t help that he was human and prone to the sort of sexual attraction that came to life each time he saw Jacqueline’s hair flowing over her shoulders and the serious expression that she always seemed to carry on her heart-shaped face.

  Despite the fact that he knew little about her—or maybe because of it—he was attracted to her beauty and the enigma of her life outside of work.

  It was silly and childish, but he let his mind wander. Her legs were long and toned; her stomach would be tight. Evidence of a rigorous exercise regime. She would trace her long fingernails across his chest and he would stroke her severe but striking jawline.

  “Worried?”

  Matthew glanced at the man next to him. “What?”

  “Our jobs?”

  “Oh.” He exhaled and raised his eyebrows in noncommittal response. The elevator stopped at the regulations department and he began to follow Jacqueline through the doors. “Maybe,” he said as the doors closed behind him.

  Jacqueline continued down the hall as Matthew entered his lab’s office. Ryan McGuire was already there, scribbling in a lab notebook and marking the yellow pages up with his illegible handwriting.

  “Morning,” Matthew said.

  Ryan continued writing. “Morning.”

  “What’s got you so worked up? I mean, besides today’s obvious news.”

  Ryan stopped. He was wearing his white lab coat, evidence that he’d already been in the lab. It was against safety protocols to wear a lab coat outside of designated areas, but Matthew decided he shouldn’t say anything about it now.

  “There’s already ‘restructuring’ underway.” Ryan mimed quotation marks to emphasize the euphemism. “I’m making sure I’ve got every project completed and up to date. I’m not about to be let go.”

  “Come on. This all just happened. You really think they’re already firing people?”

  Ryan lifted his shoulders and held out his hands. “No idea. But I’m not willing to risk it.” He went back to his lab notebook. “Besides, remember what happened to West Medical?”

  “Yeah, a couple of my friends worked there.”

  “As soon as the news hit that one person—only one person—died because their artificial heart electrocuted them, West got rid of the regulations and research team that was responsible for the failure.”

  Matthew scratched his chin. “To be fair, that was a senator who died. Pretty large repercussions for the company, no?”

  “And it’s our CEO who’s dead now.” Ryan shot him an unbelieving look.

  “I see your point.”

  Over the past several months, Matthew had accepted a host of new responsibilities in an effort to prove his worth to the company. Most of those projects concerned the validation of new Sustain updates that would be going out to patients. His job was to ensure that the physical genes produced by the manufacturing division for the patient’s Sustain organ matched the genes that had been prescribed and stored in the computer database. It was a relatively simple job, but crucial nonetheless.

  He opened up the holoscreen to his work computer. Projected on the screen was a message flashing red and marked for his immediate attention: “Please report to Sustain Regulations Manager Jonathan Grieves at 4:30 p.m.”

  Exhaling, he leaned back.

  Ryan turned around and his eyes dropped when he saw the projected message. “I’m sorry, man,” he muttered.

  Then he turned away.

  Chapter 3

  Audrey Cook

  October 16, 2063

  Audrey tapped her foot impatiently as she scanned the headlines flooding her newsfeeds regarding Joel Cobb and LyfeGen. She knew she should be worried about Matthew, but she couldn’t shake the anxious desire to begin her own investigations. Every minute she sat at her desk waiting for Stephanie to get out of her meeting was another minute she could be spending scrounging up information for an investigative report. The drivel that the press bots served up as news only fed her restlessness. She made use of her time by constructing a biographical sketch of Joel Cobb, but nothing appeared relevant to the story at hand.

  Instead, she wondered what the churches and protest groups were currently plotting and turned her focus outward. Maybe there was a story there. A conspiracy piece, maybe. She always enjoyed a little healthy speculation; the press bots couldn’t speculate as well as a human and weren’t nearly as cynical.

  Audrey jotted a series of ideas on the e-paper projected onto her desk. She started to create a web of relationships between Cobb, LyfeGen, external interest groups, customers, and government agencies, looking for a target to begin her investigations. Her heart beat wildly as she concocted all the possible scenarios that might have led to Joel’s death and the repercussions that might yet take place.

  She jumped when a hand touched her shoulder. Stephanie stared down at her. “Let’s talk.”

  “Oh, sorry. Your office?”

  Stephanie nodded.

  When they reached Stephanie’s office, Audrey sat in the plain chair with an uncomfortably prominent ridge down the middle. It was the only chair that Stephanie kept for visitors. Audrey suspected her boss kept the chair around to keep meetings short and encourage visitors to see her side of things quicker.

  “There’s obvious potential in this story. That goes without saying. I’ve set fifteen percent of the
tech-focused bots sifting through and pulling out stories for immediate publication on LyfeGen. We’ll keep that side of the market saturated. But I see something big for us on the investigative side. There are a lot of questions that, thankfully for you, need to be answered by a person. No computer is going to get at these stories.”

  “Oh, yes. I completely agree.” Audrey sat on the edge of her seat.

  “I’ll cut to the chase: you need to get into LyfeGen.”

  “Right. I’ve got all the usual sources.”

  Audrey had a few sources at LyfeGen she could count on for information. There was a middle-level manager who worked in sales who had been discontent with his job for years, but didn’t have a chance at switching jobs midcareer. There was another manager or administrator of some sort who appeared to be intimately connected with the research division, who regularly delivered information on current LyfeGen projects in development along with tabloid-esque gossip. And there was a low-level information technology specialist with access to most electronic communications within the company. Those sources were enough to squeeze out the extra details that made her stories worth publishing and kept her a step ahead of the press bots. She had carefully cultivated a stable of these sources throughout the biotech industry. While Matthew knew she had anonymous sources, he didn’t know the extent of her network. In fact, he would probably be upset to learn of her ties within his own company. She felt guilty hiding this from him, but figured it was necessary for her career.

  To help protect Matthew’s career from hers, she had kept her maiden name. This layer of protection distanced their professional lives sufficiently for most casual observers. And since most of the stories she wrote about LyfeGen focused on generic industry rivalries and pipeline speculation, no one at the company had bothered to expose her relationship with a company employee or her sources.

  “I want you to stay on top of all the regulatory issues,” Stephanie said. “That’ll be a feeding frenzy for the brokers and investment firms, not to mention all the people who love or hate the Sustain. There’ll be people worried it’s going to kill them and others who just want to see the whole company burn in the chaos.”

  Audrey nodded.

  “And you, above anyone else, are in a prime position for this assignment. You’ve got the best connection to the regulations department in the whole news agency.”

  As far as Audrey knew, she was indeed the only reporter at The Shore with so many contacts to LyfeGen. The Shore focused on business news, which had helped keep them afloat as other, more generic news agencies floundered under the press bot shift in the 2020s. The agency, with some foresight, had known that the algorithms controlling most financial companies’ decisions were based on the news headlines. So The Shore quickly focused on producing stories that would garner financial groups’ interest. Their healthcare technology coverage became a cornerstone of their reporting and Stephanie Roth managed the division, directing human journalists and the software controlling the automated news language processors and streamers.

  “Your husband is going to give us the world. With him, we’ll be on the top of every newsfeed, no problem.” Stephanie’s lips curled in a devilish grin.

  Audrey’s mouth fell open. “I can’t use Matthew as a source.”

  Stephanie leaned across her desk. “Of course you can. I know that would normally put you and him in a tough spot—”

  “It’s a conflict of interest! I can’t have him as a direct source. I was already going to talk to him about the company’s strategy going forward and the general feelings in the company, but I can’t get deep into his job. He’ll get fired.”

  “That’s why you’ll use a new pseudonym: Beth Childs. I’ve already set up Beth in our employee database.”

  Audrey shook her head. “So you want me to risk his job and write stories that will do nothing for my byline? Don’t you think people will catch on anyway, seeing my name completely absent in all of this?”

  “You’ll publish stories under your pseudonym and your given name.”

  “So, twice the amount of stories and risk Matthew’s job? Am I being paid more?” Audrey glared at Stephanie.

  “You’re being paid. Period. You know as well as I do that there are plenty of journalists writing stories for free in hopes of attracting enough attention to get a job like yours.”

  With Matthew’s job already on the line, Audrey doubted she could convince him to reveal any sensitive information on LyfeGen’s inner workings. There would be little mercy for anyone actively contributing to the company’s shrinking market share and public image.

  Audrey let out an exasperated sigh. “You know just how to twist someone’s arm, huh?” She sank back into the chair and the pointed ridge prodded her spine again.

  Stephanie offered a consolatory smirk. “And I’m hoping you can twist your husband’s.”

  Chapter 4

  Matthew Pierce

  October 16, 2063

  When 4:30 p.m. drew near, Matthew headed down the brightly lit hallways. The fresh scent of the ocean wafted through, distracting him, reminding him of the lazy childhood days he’d spent on Myrtle Beach with his family, playing in the crashing waves. Days without responsibility or purpose. Days without rent to pay, without bills of any kind.

  His thoughts turned toward the exhausting hours and countless experiments he’d run in the company labs. Showing up early, staying late. None of it would matter soon.

  Anger and frustration washed through him. He calmed himself enough to tap politely on the glass door of Jonathan Grieves’s office.

  “Come in.”

  Grieves, despite his boyish face, wore a thick black beard. Matthew suspected that Grieves would be a prime target for a comb-over and a bulging belly if it weren’t for the man’s own Sustain organ. On Grieves’s desk, a paper wrapper with the remnants of a burger lay next to an open projection document categorizing each current FDA-related project. The man was a paradox: messy in his personal life, but somehow meticulously organized when it came to work matters.

  “How’s it going?”

  Matthew feigned a calm smile. “Good. How about you?”

  “I won’t lie: today’s been a bit of a circus. Tragedy, really. Joel was a great guy.”

  “It’s hard to believe he’s gone.”

  “You’ve got that right. He built this company. You’re—what—maybe thirty?”

  Matthew nodded. He stood in front of Grieves’s desk, his hands clenched together.

  Grieves, arms folded behind his head, stared up at the ceiling. “I tried to start a company of my own when I was your age. I remember Joel coming up to me at a tissue-engineering conference in Boston and telling me he wanted me to work for him. Right there, while I was trying to convince some academic type about the legitimacy of the heart valve project I was trying to promote. Of course, I thought I was really going somewhere and I declined. A year later, with all my funds dried up and my investors pissed, I came back to him and he told me the offer was still good. Really, he was a stand-up guy.” As if noticing Matthew’s awkward standing for the first time, Grieves scowled. “Well, come on in and sit down.” He motioned to the empty chair.

  When Matthew sat, the hard plastic felt warm. Another person had been there only moments before. He couldn’t help but wonder if that individual still worked in the building or had found themselves the recipient of a freshly cut severance check.

  “Will you be going to the memorial service?”

  “When is it?”

  Jonathan shrugged and tugged at his beard. “They haven’t said anything yet. I’m just assuming they’ll have one.”

  “Well, yes, I assume so, then.”

  “Great.” After brushing crumbs from his desk, Jonathan leaned forward. “Let’s get to the point. We’re going to miss Joel around here, but we’ve got to move forward. The company is still here, several thousand jobs on the line, and a bunch of hospitals still want our goods. However, that’s not our problem.”

/>   The conversation seemed to be going differently than Matthew had envisioned. “What do you mean?”

  “You and me. Our problem is the FDA. No doubt you’ve already heard the nasty rumors streaming around about the Sustain being defective and that there’s going to be an FDA audit. Now, I doubt it will come to that. What happened is really unfortunate. Really ironic, too, given Joel’s role in the whole thing. But, one case is one case. One isolated instance.”

  Matthew nodded.

  “Joel didn’t put me in this position because I think things like this will just blow over. I like to be optimistic, but I’m always prepared for the worst.” Jonathan stood and paced. “Here’s the deal. Say, for some reason, we did have an issue with the Sustain. And please don’t go acting like we have a problem. That’s the last thing we need.”

  “Of course.”

  “Our competitors are going to be jumping at this opportunity. You know that Medscape and NanoTech will be chomping at the bit to see us fail. They want that more than anything. They’ll be working as hard as they can to undermine us and keep these rumors swirling around the news streams as long as possible.” Jonathan straightened and looked at Matthew as if he were a colonel addressing a new recruit. “We need to be able to show that the Sustain is absolutely safe. I want to begin some studies—completely closed door—right now. Just in case the FDA comes knocking, we’ll have half the experiments already done. That way, if they do tell us to pull it off the market until they can do further studies, we’ll have less off-market time. You follow?”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “Great. Now, that’s the easy part. Showing the Sustain itself is safe is relatively straightforward. Give ’em more animal studies, trying to mimic the whole stroke situation Joel fell under—all that jazz. The hard part is proving our updates are safe. So far, we’ve been able to get FDA approval for each and every update. We just have to show that they’re all pretty much the same.”

  “Right. The delivery vector is always the same and that’s not an issue.”