Conception: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (Perfectible Animals Book 1)

by Thomas Norwood

  “I can understand what that’s like. Two years ago I was diagnosed with cancer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t mind. I’m at peace with it now. It’s been one of the best things that’s happened to me in some ways. It’s changed my perspective on everything.”

  “Yes, I know how that feels.” I thought about how my own perspective had changed since finding out about Annie’s illness. “But you’re still scared, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I’m scared. But what else can I do? Just like you’re telling yourself you can save your wife, I’m telling myself that everything’s going to be alright. That’s the best we can do, really, isn’t it?” Rowen reached across and put his hand on my shoulder. The feeling of his hand on me, so heavy and warm, was strange, but although I was uncomfortable with it I felt bereft when he took it away. “I used to be like you, you know? Always trying to hold onto something. I think we realize, though, deep down, that nothing is ever really going to protect us.”

  I nodded, wondering if he was going to give me a sermon, but he stopped.

  “Enough talk,” he said. “Go. Go and have fun. Go and do whatever you like. Enjoy the night. Enjoy yourself. Nothing bad will happen to you. I promise. Here, before you go, give me a hug.”

  With any other person I would have considered this an odd request, but from this man, at this time, it seemed appropriate. I reached over and hugged him and as I felt his arms wrapping around me a peace and emptiness invaded me, a feeling of protection and warmth and lightness that I hadn’t felt in a long time, and for a moment I understood why people were drawn to him.

  “What about our project?” I said, climbing off the bed.

  “Do you think you can find a cure for cancer?”

  “How long have you got?”

  “Months. Maybe a year.”

  “I’m sorry. I’d like to say yes, but I don’t think so.”

  “That’s okay. Let me think about it. I’ll talk to my people about it. Give me some time. Now I have to rest.”

  “Okay. I understand. It’s been a pleasure meeting you. Thank you for the opportunity.” I slipped my shoes back on.

  “The pleasure’s all mine.”

  “Good luck.”

  “You too.”

  I wasn’t sure why but I clasped my hands together and gave Rowen a little bow. Rowen returned the gesture then reached under a pillow and a moment later two young men appeared and helped him away.

  Inside the hall the lights had been dimmed. The thumping beat of the music reverberated through the floor and up into my body. People were dancing, hundreds of swirling, dropping, lifting, flying figures, blurs of color and sound.

  Suni came over to me and motioned for me to join her. She led me onto the dance floor, rocking gently with me for a minute, holding my hand as I found the rhythm.

  “Just let yourself go,” she whispered. “Let your body dance its own dance. Don’t try to control it. Follow your feet.” She span around in slow circles in front of me, then started orbiting me, as if letting her body drift into my gravitational field.

  I let my feet take me where they would. They led me in an orbit of my own, small circles which gradually became larger until Suni and I were circling each other and spinning as we did so. I let myself go with the music then, let it guide me. Around me were groups of interconnected bodies, flowing into one another and writhing over one another. Suni drifted off with another man and another woman appeared before me and our bodies seemed to attract then repel like two magnets twisting and turning and bouncing off one another.

  Then she too went away.

  Suddenly all the stress of the last few years rose up inside me and I made my way over to the side of the hall and found a place alone on a lounge in a dark corner. I thought about Annie and all that she meant to me, about the world that I had once loved and that no longer existed. About how much destruction humans had brought upon themselves and upon everything else on this planet. I wondered if Rowen was going to give us any funding and then I thought maybe it would be better if he didn’t. Making humans stronger probably wasn’t such a good idea anyway. The last thing we needed was more humans in this world.

  After a little while, Sophie found me. “Are you enjoying the party?” She sat down next to me and put a hand on my knee.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Would you like to come upstairs?”

  “What’s upstairs?”

  “The rest of the party.” She raised her eyebrows at me.

  My pulse throbbed and my stomach clenched up on me. What was she suggesting? Annie and I had talked about the possibility of me being invited to participate in the New Church orgy, and Annie had told me that I should make the most of it. I had told her I wasn’t interested, but Annie had laughed and told me to give it a try: she was much more practical about these things than I was. I couldn’t deny that I was attracted to Sophie – any man would have been – but the idea of betraying my wife was painful just to think about.

  Another part of me, though, knew that at some point I would have to let her go. She was dying and, without a cure, probably only had another two years at the most. And the chances of us finding a cure, especially now, were not good. If I was honest with myself they never had been. Even if we could get our modifications working, the possibility they’d cure HIV-4 was less than fifty percent. The world was falling away from me and everything that had previously kept me supported was fading.

  “Well?” Sophie said. “It’s not polite to keep a lady waiting.” She took my hand.

  Was Dylan okay with this? Would Annie really be? If there was one thing I’d learnt about women over the years it was that they didn’t always say what they meant.

  I felt as if I were standing at the open door of a plane, three thousand meters above the ground, about to skydive for the first time in my life.

  “Okay,” I said to Sophie, deciding to follow her upstairs but do nothing more. At the very least it would make an interesting subject of scientific study – something to report back to Annie about. She’d joked about wanting a full rundown.

  “Should we invite someone?” Sophie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “How about that woman over there?” Sophie pointed towards a very attractive woman just slightly younger than I was.

  I hesitated. How could I tell Sophie that I wasn’t going to do anything? Or was I just kidding myself? Did I really want this to happen but just hadn’t admitted it to myself?

  Either way, I couldn’t stay where I was. I looked and felt like a fool.

  “Come on, coward.” Sophie nudged me with her elbow. Before I knew it she had stood up and was walking across to the woman. The woman didn’t speak but put her hand gently into Sophie’s. They headed for the foyer. Sophie glanced back at me and I followed.

  We wound our way up the stairs and onto the interior balcony, looking down upon Sophie’s fountain. Dimmed chandeliers spread a faint red glow against the walls. People, entirely naked or almost, lounged against walls or in arm chairs.

  Sophie was ahead of us. She strode past a number of closed doors until we reached one which was open. Inside were mostly naked figures on an enormous four-poster bed, a diaphanous screen around them. We stood and watched for a minute, then went to the next open door, a similar room with a similar bed, but empty.

  Sophie and the woman disappeared inside and I stood at the threshold, wondering what to do next.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MY BODY SLUMPED down into the chair in my office. It had been a week since the party at Rowen’s and there was still no word on whether or not he was going to invest in our project. I was starting to think the whole thing had been a waste of time, and I was angry with myself for getting both my own and Annie’s hopes up.

  I checked through my mail messages. There were a few internal messages, a few from other geneticists around the world, and then there was one from a man named Bruno Salacio. I had met Bruno once at a neurosc
ience conference. He was a well-regarded evolutionary biologist.

  Hi Michael,

  I’m contacting you because I’ve just read a paper of yours that I’ve been asked to referee concerning your studies with bonobo genes in macaques and I think you might be interested in a new line of research that we are about to undertake. I was wondering if we could arrange a meeting?

  Bruno.

  The message was strangely unforthcoming. Bruno’s signature had a number so I connected to it, but it went to voicemail and I left a message. I asked the net for more information about him, but all I could gather was that he worked for a company called FutureGen, a biotech similar to Geneus.

  As I was eating lunch that day, Bruno’s name appeared on my overlay. I answered the call and Bruno asked me if we could meet but wouldn’t tell me why. We agreed on a time and a place: at Melbourne University that afternoon.

  I sat staring out the glass windows of the Geneus cafeteria onto the small paved courtyard, wondering what he could possibly want with me. Maybe FutureGen wanted to invest. Or maybe they were going to try to poach me. If they had the money I might consider it. I could take Justin, Masanori, Yolanda and Richard with me and make a fresh start. Except Geneus had a non-competition clause in my employment contract and time was running out to find a cure for Annie.

  Later that afternoon, I took a cable car from near my office building to the other end of town, floating between plane trees and above power lines. I looked down at the masses of people crowding the streets: a mix of cultures and sub-cultures from all over the world.

  I got off at the station closest to Melbourne University and walked across. Armed guards stood at the entrance with machine guns and I had to show them my identification and have my body scanned. Two years before a bomb had been set off there, apparently by an eco-terrorist group angry that the university had accepted funding from fossil fuel companies. It had killed thirty-seven people.

  I walked between a line of elms and the modern, concrete, buildings to where the old, sandstone, buildings started with their tiled roofs and ivy-covered walls. Clusters of students talked and laughed in the spring sunshine. I remembered my own time there, that innocent abstract world where everything was theoretical, where anything seemed possible. I remembered my life with Dylan, sharing a room in one of the on-campus colleges, and how during our third year, Dylan had decided to do his thesis on bonobos.

  Dylan was especially interested in the bonobo mating habits, which seemed to closely parallel his own. In typical Dylan style he organized an expedition to the Congo in a matter of weeks and asked me if I wanted to join him. At the time a civil war had just ended in the Congo and all the travel advice warned us not to go. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to go to the Congo, but that I wanted to try to keep my only friend out of trouble.

  After a twenty-four hour flight, a nine hour bus trip, a two hour jeep ride and a two day boat ride up a river surrounded by jungle – where the only signs of human life were tiny villages of thatched huts and the fishermen and traders on log canoes who serviced them – we finally arrived at a village. Our guide, James, a very black man with a very white smile, told us we would be able to find the bonobos there.

  We spent the next few weeks observing these peace-loving creatures. Almost every circumstance in life – whether it be finding new food or meeting another troop – seemed to demand a round of almost indiscriminate sex. Aggression between members was almost non-existent, and even when they came across other groups they welcomed rather than rejected them.

  On our way home from the Congo we stopped off in Tanzania to spend a few days at the chimpanzee research center in Gombe. Here we saw something totally different. Male chimps, especially those competing for alpha male status, spent a good deal of time and energy displaying aggressively for one another, something bonobos never did. Females were bullied and often attacked by the males and even other females, and while they were cooperative in family units or among cliques, as a rule they didn’t help each other. The one time we saw them come into contact with another troop there was an aggressive standoff before both groups went their separate ways.

  It was in Africa that I decided to analyze the bonobo genome and see where it differed from both chimpanzees and humans, and where Dylan decided to live in a way more similar to his bonobo cousins.

  “Michael, nice to see you again. Thanks for coming.” Bruno, a heavy-set man, bald on top but with a beard to make up for it, offered me his hand.

  “Bruno, likewise.”

  Bruno led me across a grassy clearing. We went under a stone arch to a courtyard where a single tree was growing, its bare branches twisted into ever-smaller spirals, leaves just starting to bud.

  “So, you’re interested in my work?” I said.

  “It was actually a mutual acquaintance, Rowen Boone, who asked me to meet with you.”

  “Rowen?” My heart did a double-take.

  “Yes. He mentioned that you were involved in a project that our organization might be interested in investing in.”

  “FutureGen?”

  “No. That’s just my day job.” Bruno smiled.

  “You’re part of the New Church?”

  “No, no, we’re something else entirely. Here, come through.”

  Bruno led me through some large double doors into a cool hallway and then to a small office with stained glass windows that looked out onto a native garden. He shut the heavy door behind us.

  “Have a seat,” Bruno said, motioning to a club lounge.

  I sat down and Bruno lowered himself into a chair across from me.

  “The possibility of genetic modification changing the human race in a favorable way is something that I have been interested in for a very long time,” Bruno lowered his voice and leaned in towards me. “Being an evolutionary biologist, I’m always interested in the way certain species have evolved, particularly Homo sapiens, and I, like you, presumably, can’t help thinking that we’ve evolved to a very dangerous point and haven’t gone any further.”

  “Just smart enough to kill ourselves and everything else along with us,” I said, still wondering how Bruno knew Rowen and how much Rowen had told him.

  “Exactly. Now, Rowen mentioned Geneus’s lack of funding.”

  “Yes. We’ve been looking for investors.”

  “He said that. He also mentioned that part of the reason you’re so desperate to find an investor is because your wife is sick with HIV-4. Something Geneus doesn’t know about.”

  I looked at him and felt my intestines start to stir. How could I have been so stupid as to confide that to Rowen? I put my hands on my knees, wanting to stand up, but I stayed where I was.

  “Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “What is it you want, then?” I was angry, more at myself than anyone else, but I tried to contain it. I couldn’t afford to get Bruno off-side.

  “We want to invest in the project,” Bruno said.

  “Who?”

  “I can’t disclose our organization.”

  “Why are you meeting with me, then? Anthony Simons is the man to talk to for new investment.”

  “Because we want you to provide us with information. Information about the state of the project. The processes. Everything you do.”

  “You’d have access to much of that as investors, anyway.” I was afraid that if I didn’t do what he wanted he would tell someone at Geneus about Annie and I would lose my job and be made a pariah.

  “Yes. You’re right. But it’s access to what we wouldn’t get as investors that we’re interested in.”

  I suddenly realized what he was talking about: industrial espionage.

  “I’m sorry. I’m not your man,” I said, starting to stand up but hesitating.

  “Hold on, sit down a moment.” Bruno waved me down. “Just hear me out.”

  I had little choice.

  “The reason I mentioned your wife was not to extort you, but because I need to be able to trust you.”
>
  “It’s hardly the best way of going about it.” I took a deep breath.

  “I gather from your papers and your research that you are no happier with the current evolution of Homo sapiens than I am. My question is, how unhappy are you? What do you think’s going to happen to us over the next fifty to a hundred years, and what would you be prepared to do to change that?” Bruno stared at me unblinkingly. His voice was deep and sure of itself, and I suddenly felt even more afraid than I had a moment ago.

  “Why?”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Okay,” I replied, my heart still pounding. I thought about the de-regulated zones, the civil wars breaking out around the world. “I believe society is returning to a more primitive state. The most cunning and aggressive members of the species are rising up and leading the poor and the hungry, protecting them in return for their loyalty, their money, and their lives. They’re fighting it out, both here and overseas, for resources and territory. I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to return to civilization as we know it, as all of the easily obtainable resources that allowed us to develop this far have been exhausted. I think for the next couple of hundred years at least, if not for thousands of years, we’ll enter into a period similar to the dark ages, where war and aggression will win out over reason and justice. As to what I’m prepared to do about that, I’m already doing it. I believe an improved immune system will stop much of the suffering that’s been caused by disease throughout history. Even if people are poor, at the very least we can keep them healthy.”

  “What about your research on cooperation?” Bruno said.

  “What about it?” I shrugged.

  “Wouldn’t you like to continue with that?”

  “Of course I would. But I don’t think that’s going to be possible.”

  “How about if I told you it was?”

  “Even if I had the funding, I’m not sure I’ve got the time.”

  “What if I told you that we could provide all the funding you needed, both for your immune-system research and your cooperation research?”