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

by Thomas Norwood

  “It’s the best chance he’s got, though, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Okay then, please, go ahead.” Gilda put her hands together and closed her eyes, and I could hear her praying.

  That’s not going to save him, I wanted to tell her, but I realized the person being saved by her prayer was not her son but herself: giving her the strength and courage to continue.

  Annie quickly injected Sam with the antibodies. He needed to be kept in a bed and monitored, but there were no such facilities at the clinic.

  “What if we stay with him?” I whispered to Annie as Gilda continued to pray. “We could go to their house and do what we can for him there.”

  It was almost impossible for non-reg citizens, as they were known, to get inside the regulated zone, but there was nothing stopping us from staying outside.

  Annie looked at me and took my hand. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t get too close,” she warned. “It’s a lot worse out there than you can imagine.”

  We sent Gilda home and told her that we would come and visit her that night.

  “It’ll be dangerous. I’ll have to get permission,” Gilda told us.

  “Okay,” Annie replied. “Call me here at the clinic.”

  Gilda hugged us both and then, despite her small size, picked her son up and carried him out the door.

  That evening, we drove slowly through a street dotted with potholes. On either side of the road concrete shacks had been built between shipping containers and tin tents.

  “What do people here eat?” I asked.

  “Chickens and eggs, mainly,” Annie said. We had passed more than one free-roaming hen on the way in, although I presumed most people had theirs well-protected. “Micronutrient and vitamin supplements sometimes, when aid organizations hand them out. And any animals they can get their hands on, which are usually dogs and rats, I think.”

  “Let’s not stay for dinner, then.”

  Annie turned to me and smiled.

  Our car passed a feral looking gang of teenagers, all with torn clothes and matted hair. They looked in at us like we were aliens, and I imagined they didn’t see too many “normal” people out here any more. Some of the younger children probably wouldn’t even remember what the world used to be like.

  A kind of local law and order had been established in these shanty towns, and locals tended to look out for one another. They were mainly run by local cartels, though, and before we’d come in here calls had been made by Gilda to the leaders of her local “council” to get permission. Most of the cartels liked what the clinic was doing, as Annie and her team had sewn them up on enough occasions, so we had been allowed to pass.

  Eventually our vehicle pulled up outside a shipping container, and Annie told me this was it. We went inside and found Gilda stroking Sam’s head as he lay in the corner on a mattress. The stench inside was awful — of unwashed bodies — but I soon got used to it. Gilda’s mother was out the back, which we got to via a hole covered with a blanket. She was stirring some stew over a forty gallon drum. I wondered how they got enough fuel for cooking. A couple of the neighbors were sitting around on the wreckage of old camping chairs and upturned tires, waiting for the meal. If they all cooked together, it was presumably easier.

  I needed to use the toilet and wished I’d gone before we left the clinic. Gilda told me where it was and sent one of the neighbor’s boys to accompany me.

  “Jut down ‘ere,” he said, speaking with a twang so strong that I had trouble understanding him.

  He led me to a series of small sheds that had large plastic wheely bins underneath them to collect the waste. I was surprised to find it so well organized. Although it stunk, at least it was hygienic.

  After I’d finished I asked the boy where the contents of the bins went when they were full.

  “Down the creek,” he told me, pointing.

  Back at the house, Annie was checking Sam’s temperature. It seemed to have gone down, and she patted his head with a clean cloth she’d brought that she was dipping in a bucket of water.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “He seems okay so far.”

  That night, someone produced a guitar and someone else a bottle of home-brewed spirits and they all sung songs around the fire. I leant back in my dilapidated camp chair and stared up at the stars, brighter than they ever were in the city. Despite their poverty, there seemed to be a bond between these people that I rarely experienced in the regulated zone.

  When we went to sleep in our car, after checking one last time on Sam and receiving hugs from both Gilda and her mother and pats on the back from some of the other neighbors, I felt a deep solace.

  The next morning, we took Sam in to the clinic and ran his blood tests. His viral load had dropped. Gilda was overjoyed despite Annie’s warnings that it was still too early to predict the outcome.

  That night, we drove home exhausted.

  “I guess we probably shouldn’t run away, should we?” Annie said to me as we neared our house, reaching across and taking my hand.

  I turned to look at her silhouette in the dark car, lit up by street lights. Her eyes and skin glistened.

  “No. Probably not,” I said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THREE MONTHS LATER, Masanori, Justin, Yolanda, Richard, and a number of other members of our team and I were all transported to the military base. Annie had decided to stay home and continue her work at the clinic, but I hoped she would follow me soon.

  The afternoon we arrived, Kate and her assistant, Silvia, took us all on another tour of their laboratories. There were five floors altogether, over two-thousand square meters in total, filled with every piece of equipment available and the staff to operate it.

  “And in here is where we will be conducting the research using the new equipment.” Kate opened the door to a large section of the lab. Over the last three months they’d built a machine, based mostly on our plans, that created viruses capable of inserting genes precisely at any given location.

  “Would you like me to show them the software?” said Shung, one of the technicians: a short, cute Asian woman with a fringe that kept falling in her eyes that she kept brushing away again.

  Justin, who was standing next to me, pushed to the front. He was eager to see his creation made reality. He still believed that, as soon as we had done what the military wanted us to do, we were going to be able to use the technology to apply to our immune system modifications. I still hadn’t had the courage to tell him that probably wasn’t going to happen. The military had insisted our process was not to be used in any other application. Klaus had told me to keep the information to myself, but I felt Justin deserved a warning. I just hadn’t found a way to tell him yet.

  “Sure,” Kate said. “Just a brief demonstration.”

  Shung activated a screen on our public overlays. With a few movements of her hands in the air she brought up a sequence of nucleotides. “This sequence comes from chromosome twelve. Av457 to be precise, responsible for hair color. Now, if we open up this folder over here, we can see that we have the strings for any hair color we choose.” She brought up an array of 3D heads with different colored hair. “All we have to do is select the string we want replaced, like so, delete it, which will be done using restriction sites coded into the bio-vectors, select the exact insertion points, like this, and then drag and drop the new string into place.” She dragged one of the files across and dropped it onto the double-helix icon, which incorporated the change. “And on voice command, the robotics make what you’ve just designed.”

  “Tell me about the workflow,” Justin said.

  “Very efficient. You can save this operation and then move straight on to the next task. You can switch between genes, between chromosomes, all very easily.”

  Justin asked her a few more questions and by the way she kept flicking at her hair even when it wasn’t in front of her eyes, I wondered if we might ha
ve a laboratory romance on our hands.

  We spent the next few weeks analyzing the Rebola virus. Kate and her team had already sequenced the genome and worked out its infection and replication strategies. I checked through every inch of its genetic code to find some trace of its engineer. Like computer programmers, genetic engineers often left signatures of code which marked a design as their own, or left commented sections to serve as place-markers for themselves or future engineers. Many had specific ways of ordering things, and I had seen enough code in my life that I could often recognize which university an engineer came from if not the specific engineer themselves. This one was completely clean, though. Which was no surprise. The engineer, or engineers, had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to keep it that way.

  Kate and I became friends, but for some reason I didn’t completely trust her. It might have been because I didn’t trust anybody working for the military. The military had an agenda that went far beyond keeping the everyday citizens safe. It was controlled by corporate interests, and whether or not the people working inside believed the bullshit or not didn’t make them any less guilty.

  A group of us sat down together for dinner one night and Justin, who was sitting next to me, started telling me excitedly about how cool the new software was; a machine he’d affectionately named HAL.

  “I can take out a single gene at a thousand paces.” He laughed, mimicking shooting with a sniper rifle.

  “He’s very good,” Shung said, who was sitting next to him. “I’ve never seen someone work so quickly.”

  “He’s one of our best,” I said.

  “Almost as good as I am.” Shung pouted at Justin, and they went into a little giggle of cutesie-talk.

  Once they’d finished, Justin turned back to me. “So, when do you think we’re going to be able to start applying it to our immune system mods? So far all we’ve been doing is focusing on this one virus.”

  “I’m really not sure,” I said.

  After dinner, I asked him to meet me in the garden foyer of the accommodation wing.

  “What’s up?” He came over to me later that night. His hair was scruffy, and I wondered if he’d been playing around with Shung. At least it might help him to take the news a little more lightly.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  He sat down, looking at me. His gaunt face and large, watery eyes twisted. I looked around to make sure nobody else was listening. There was a cleaner over by a small fountain, but apart from her the place was empty.

  “I’m afraid Geneus is not going to let us go on with our somatic immune system trials.”

  “W-what? Isn’t that what HAL is for?” When Justin got nervous he stuttered.

  “No. The military is insisting that we concentrate on producing a resistance to Rebola.”

  “But that’s crazy. All we have to do is p-program HAL to make the modifications we’ve already come up with. It’s a-all ready to go. A final macaque trial and we could start on the human trials.”

  I shook my head. “They say they don’t have the resources and that’s not what they’re interested in.”

  “But, what about Penny?” Penny was Justin’s sister.

  “I know. I understand.” I clasped my hand around his arm and held him firmly. “I know exactly how you feel.”

  “How long have you known this for?” He stared at me, pulling away.

  “Just a few weeks. Since just before we left. Klaus told me not to tell anyone.”

  “But you know how much this means to me?” Justin put his hands on either side of the chair as if he were about to stand up and walk away.

  “Which is why I’m telling you now.”

  “You should have told me then.” He slumped down and put his face in his hands. I wondered if he was going to cry. He’d been so happy these last few weeks, despite the pending threat of a virus that could potentially wipe the human population out within days.

  “There’s something else I need to tell you,” I said.

  “What’s that?” He said without looking up at me.

  I stared around the large atrium-like room, a soft glow coming from the opaque white roof. Climbers and ferns grew down here even better than they did in a rainforest. The air was slightly humid and had a damp, musty tinge to it. “My wife has HIV-4, too.”

  “Annie?” He raised his head.

  “Yes. She’s had it for years. Apart from our families and some close friends, you’re the only one who knows.”

  He started shaking, moving his head from side to side as if he didn’t know what to do any more. “Is that why you’ve been working on this project all along?”

  “It’s part of it. Not the only reason.”

  “I’m sorry.” Tears welled up in his eyes which he didn’t wipe away.

  We both sat there for a few minutes, lost in our own private thoughts.

  “What can we do?” Justin broke the silence.

  “I don’t know. I had thought of going ahead with the trials anyway, but everything is so regulated here, I don’t know if we’d get away with it.”

  “Shung keeps an eye on that machine like a hawk. The logs are checked constantly and not just by her.”

  “I don’t know, then. The other thing I’m worried about is exactly what they’ve got us working on.”

  “You mean apart from Rebola?”

  “Yes. Don’t you think it’s strange, working on just one virus.”

  “What do you mean?” He finally wiped away his tears and stared at me out of red eyes.

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’re going to come up with a virus of their own.”

  “Bio-warfare is completely against the Geneva convention.”

  “Do you really think they still care about that? The whole world is going to hell, Justin.”

  Justin put his face in his hands again and more than thinking about the world going to hell or the evils of bio-warfare I could tell he was thinking about his sister.

  “She’ll be okay,” I said gently, putting a hand on his shoulder.

  “Do you really think so?” He shook his head and looked up at me.

  “Yes. She will be. We’re going to find a solution to this.”

  I went back to my room feeling a huge sadness but also relief. I had wanted to tell Justin about Annie’s illness for so long, and finally coming clean with him and having him not hate me was as much as I could ask for.

  I lay down on my bed and called Annie. She answered and her image appeared in front of me on my visual overlay; she was in her office working.

  “I finally told Justin,” I told her.

  “Was he upset?”

  “Of course. I told him about you as well.”

  “Did that make him feel better?”

  “It seemed to. It made me feel better. At least I’ve got someone on my side now. And hiding it from him was awful.”

  “Do you think he’ll be able to find a way to help you?”

  “If anyone can it’s him.”

  “You two designed that thing — surely you can find a way to use it without anyone finding out.”

  “Even if we could, the modifications we came up with were never tested on humans.”

  “If someone’s about to die, what does it matter?”

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  “So, test it on me.”

  “Or on someone else who’s going to die sooner.” Annie still had at least two years left and I didn’t want to risk her health any more than necessary.

  “If you build in a chemical safety trigger to shut the modifications off, it won’t matter.”

  “Provided we get to it in time. And the shock isn’t too much for your system.”

  “I’m going to die anyway. We might as well try.”

  I stared up at the white plaster ceiling, and was suddenly uncomfortably aware of the half a kilometer of rock and soil that was above me. I imagined it collapsing in on me, crushing me. I wanted to get out of there, get up to the surface. I took deep breaths.
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br />   “I’ll talk to Justin,” I said. “There is a training mode built in to the system — if we can somehow bypass the GUI and code the changes in directly via the command line then nobody need find out about it. We didn’t write the software, though, so I’m not sure how easy that’s going to be. Justin might be able to find a way.”

  The next night, I waited for Justin in the same place we’d met the night before — the garden. Out of all the rooms in the underground complex this place made me feel the most relaxed. Just the presence of plants, the thriving greenery, the warm but soft light, made my mind stop its mad rush for a second and contemplate my surroundings. Behind me grew tall strands of bamboo, and I admired their smooth slender trunks. In front of me were camelias, in full, blood-red bloom.

  Justin and I used to play chess together, and while I waited I called up a chess app on my com.

  “Black or white?” I said to Justin when he arrived, sending him a link to the game.

  “White.”

  The board spun around slowly in front of me, at thirty percent opacity so I could still see Justin behind it. I shrunk it a little and moved it down. “Your turn then.”

  He moved his pawn and I moved mine.

  “What is it you wanted to tell me?” he said.

  “I think I might have thought of a way to program some bio-vectors without getting caught.”

  “How?”

  “Well, you know how the machine has a training mode for students?”

  “Yes.”

  “The module was built with an instant delete function, as soon as you log out. The code for vector design is unencrypted. If you could find a way to hack in and do the coding by hand, bypassing the GUI, nobody would ever find out about it. Do you think you can do that?”

  He looked up at me with a large, cheeky smile on his face and I imagined him as a fifteen year old boy hacking into corporate servers just to mess with them. “I can try. Aren’t there limitations on the training mode, though?”

  “Yes. There are. There’s usually a limit to the amount of instructions that can be programmed into the vectors, but not if we’re doing it by hand.”