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

by Thomas Norwood

  “I’ll have to discuss it with Rowen and the other leaders. Now’s a difficult time, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Rowen’s funeral’s on Saturday.”

  “He died?” I was shocked. Why hadn’t Dylan mentioned this?

  “Not yet,” Sophie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s going to euthanize himself,” Dylan said. “He wants to speak at his own funeral, and then he wants to die and for us to put his body in the ocean.”

  “Where? Here?”

  “No. He’s at our main military base. There’s an aircraft carrier and a sea-stead about two hundred kilometers from here.”

  We talked about other things for a while, then Dylan said, “Enough of all this talk. We should dance.” He got up and changed the moody jazz to some upbeat swing music.

  “I can’t dance,” Annie said.

  “Of course you can. Everybody can dance. Here.” Dylan took her hand and lifted her up off the ground, cupping her in his arms and spinning her around the floor.

  Sophie and I looked at one another, and Sophie reached out her hand and I took it and we pulled each other up. We clasped on to one another and started jiving around the floor, and I could hear Annie laughing for the first time in months.

  “See, told you you could dance,” Dylan said.

  “But you’re doing everything,” Annie said, laughing again as he spun her light body around in circles.

  Then a waltz came on, and I could feel Sophie getting closer to me. At first I kept a respectable distance, but then I looked across and saw Annie swaying gently against Dylan, her chin nuzzled up against his neck, and I let my inhibitions go and felt the tingling pleasure of Sophie’s body pressed into mine.

  The next morning we all went down to the place where the land met the ocean, and swam. I watched and cried as Annie splashed in the waves, laughing and then screaming at them over the sound of their relentless onslaught.

  Annie wanted to see the macaques, and we drove out to the small patch of forest where they usually hung out. There were a number of fruit trees there, and apparently the monkeys never ventured too far from them.

  We got out of the car and it wasn’t long before we could hear their playful screeching.

  “Toby, Sika,” I called out. “Sika, Toby.”

  The play in the branches continued and we could see a group of them up there swinging around, resting, or grooming one another. And then I saw Toby — looking down at me from one of the highest branches.

  “Toby, it’s me. Toby, come.”

  “Sika,” Annie called out. “Sika.”

  Just as I thought he wasn’t going to move, Toby swung down from the branches and slid down the nearest trunk and came running across to us. He leaped up onto my body and before I knew it he was sitting on my shoulder and had his arms wrapped tightly around my head.

  “Toby!” I lifted him down and hugged him tightly against my chest.

  Annie came over too and we both embraced him.

  “Where’s Sika?” Annie said, half to me and half to Toby. “I hope she’s alright.”

  Just then we saw another set of eyes peering at us from a lower branch, and then Sika too was coming across to us and climbing up onto our bodies.

  We spent the next few hours playing with them and enjoying being in the forest.

  “A couple of local scientists have been out here observing them,” Dylan said. “Apparently, they’ve been seen helping out their sick. A few months ago one of the older ones got some kind of a fever and wasn’t able to move for a few days, and instead of leaving her alone the others took turns in bringing her food and sitting with her.”

  “Not only that,” Sophie said, “but apparently they’ve been seen helping other animals as well. There was a dog out here that got caught in an old net a while ago and some of them helped free it.”

  A few days later, a small plane carrying twelve of us circled over an aircraft carrier and a sea-stead in the South Pacific ocean. I gripped my seat tightly as we swooped down and thudded gently into the runway, and the engines brought the plane to a grinding halt just meters from the railing.

  Dylan climbed down from the pilot’s seat and as we disembarked he held out his hand to Annie. The other passengers all seemed to know their way around, and they headed off in the direction of a swing bridge which connected the huge floating hulk of the aircraft carrier to what looked like a floating town.

  I stared up at the gray metal turret of the ship’s control tower. At the top was a row of windows and above them three radar dishes slowly circled. Along the sides of the landing strip fighter jets stood at the ready. Groups of soldiers were doing exercises in front of them.

  “Training,” Dylan said, following my gaze.

  “You’re expecting an attack?”

  “You can never be too sure.”

  “A few soldiers are hardly going to be able to prevent an attack. You’re pretty exposed out here.” I looked out at the ocean surrounding us in every direction.

  “There are two submarines equipped with long range tracker missiles and anti-aircraft launchers just a few kilometers away. And under the runway here are another twelve F-37 bombers.”

  “All for this platform?”

  “This is the main hub. If this place goes then many of our key people would die. But there are other places like this a few hundred kilometers from here that our forces could get to easily enough if required.”

  “And governments allow this?”

  “Most of them are too caught up in their own problems right now to worry about us. Our main concern is if some dictator takes over a well-armed country and decides to invade us.”

  We crossed the long swing bridge between the aircraft carrier and the nearest floating platform, and I looked down at the waves below, crashing against the hull of the ship and the floating pylons under the town.

  “So do these things move around?” I said.

  “They’re designed to be towed if necessary. If the climate gets much worse we’ll probably need to move them further south to cooler waters.”

  On the other side of the bridge was a small park with a four-story office building overlooking it. Dylan led us over to a golf cart. The streets were just wide enough for two golf carts to pass one another.

  We stopped outside an apartment building. Our room inside was barely twenty square meters, but it contained a bed, a desk, a small dining table, a kitchen and a bathroom.

  “Space is limited, I’m afraid. But hopefully this will do.”

  “This will be perfect.” I went over to a window that looked directly out onto the ocean. Waves were at a meter and a half but ran underneath us without causing any noticeable effect on the stability of the platform.

  “Would you like to rest, or to have a look around?”

  Annie stayed to rest, but I decided to have a look around and I followed Dylan and Sophie back down to the street. It was a warm, sunny, slightly humid day, but the sea breeze provided cool relief. Dylan had some business to attend to, so Sophie offered to be my guide.

  The town was just like a miniature version of any normal town. Most of the fresh produce was grown hydroponically, inside greenhouses, although they apparently got a shipment of dry foods once a month. Water was collected from roofs and stored in the pylons which held the platform aloft. Their main source of food was fish, which they got from floating fish farms. Sewerage was treated on board and then discharged into the sea. The whole place ran on solar, wind and wave power, and they had communications-dishes that linked them via satellite to the net. There was a school, a university and a hospital, as well as a small shopping centre where people could get food and essential household items.

  The next day, nearly twenty thousand people stood on the decks of the aircraft carrier. People had been coming in by plane all night, and hundreds of boats floated in the ocean around both the sea-stead and the carrier itself.

  “Welcome to my funeral,” Rowen said
over a loud speaker when the noise quietened down. “Thank you all very much for being here. I’ve always found it disturbing that the dead never get to hear the eulogies at their own funerals, or get to have a say themselves, so I thought I might change that!” People chuckled, and then Rowen’s brother came on.

  Over the next two hours he and nine other people all spoke passionately of Rowen’s love for life and of his unlimited generosity and optimism. Finally, Rowen himself came on again, and people clapped and cheered.

  “Thank you. My life would not have been the same without you, especially those close to me. There are too many of you to mention, but you know how much I love you all. I’ve had the most amazing life I could possibly imagine, and the thing that has struck me most is how my life turned out nearly exactly as I thought it would. Unfortunately, even the bad bits! So, keep a rein on your imaginations, people, but don’t be afraid to use them. Don’t be afraid to imagine that however bad things are, a time is coming which will be better for everyone and everything on this tiny planet. Be kind to your neighbors, to other species, to each other, love one another, and above all, try to have fun! You deserve to be happy. You deserve to live in peace. So please, celebrate not my death but my life, and celebrate your own lives at the same time.”

  With that, Rowen held up a glass of Nembutal, saluted us all, and drank it down.

  Not long after, his body, lain to rest in a small canoe covered in flowers, was carried up over the water by a helicopter and set upon the waves.

  That night and all the next day, an endless celebration took place.

  On the third morning, Dylan came to visit for breakfast and told me that there was going to be a meeting of the chiefs of all the havens, and that they were going to decide the future of the organization. He asked me if I would come and speak to them and explain to them what I needed.

  A few hours later, I stood in front of an audience of nearly a hundred men and women and gave my speech. Most of them seemed receptive, but whether or not they’d accept the idea was something Dylan told me was going to take days if not weeks of negotiations.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  A WEEK LATER, I sat at a large boardroom table on the seventy-second floor of a serviced office building. Surrounding me on the black leather chairs were the other members of Gendigm. It was the first time I’d ever met any of them except for Bruno in person.

  I looked around the room at these people who were possibly going to be responsible for the future of human life, and wondered if what we were doing was right. Desperate times required desperate solutions, though, and the world had become a desperate place.

  “We need some way of making sure we can eventually wipe out any Homo sapiens who do manage to survive, or at least sterilize them, and if we’re working on too large an area that’ll be impossible,” Frank was saying.

  “Hopefully, if what just happened at our clinic continues to happen, the modified children will start to create superbugs that will wipe out Homo sapiens naturally,” Zoe said.

  “I personally don’t think that’s necessary,” I said. “In fact, I think we should create a somatic modification for Homo sapiens to protect them against that happening. A few tweaks to some of the modifications we’ve already come up with and I think we could manage that.”

  “Why on earth would we want to do that?” Marianne said. “We need to get rid of Homo sapiens, not protect them.”

  “Whatever we do, we definitely need to put some kind of safety control into our genome, so that procreation isn’t viable,” Graeme said. “We don’t want our gene pool to be sullied.”

  “I don’t know if that’ll be necessary either,” I said. “Our new species will be so genetically superior that any infiltration into the gene pool will die out naturally.”

  “What are we going to call them, anyway?” Jonathan said.

  “How about Homo novus?” Zoe suggested.

  Everyone looked around and nodded in agreement.

  “What about if we altered the expression of sperm-egg adhesion receptors in Homo novus?” Jonathan said. “GV9 might be a possibility. That way procreation with Homo sapiens would be impossible.”

  “Or we could alter their pheromone coding, so that the Homo novus are only attractive to one another,” Zoe said. “We could, in fact, make it so that Homo sapiens pheromones are a complete turn off for them.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Jonathan said.

  “It could lead to some fairly nasty cases of unrequited love,” Graeme put in.

  “Okay, let’s work out the details of this in the lab, shall we?” Bruno said. “What other ideas have we got?”

  “I think we need to find a way to allow the Homo novus to identify one another in a way that is invisible to Homo sapiens,” said a biologist whom my overlay informed me was called James Sterner, of MIT. “Maybe we should endow them with vision for an added spectrum, and do something to their skin which reflects that, so they stand out to one another.”

  “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” Colonel James, an ex-military officer, said. “We want them to be able to infiltrate the population as safely as possible. Any exterior marker which allows them to identify one another could easily be turned against them by Homo sapiens and used to weed them out.”

  “That’s why I think we need to find a way to wipe out Homo sapiens,” Frank insisted. “What’s the point of going to all this trouble if Homo novus, or whatever you want to call them, is just going to be killed by the more aggressive species? I mean, look at us. We’re a bunch of brutish cannibals who’d eat our own friends if we had to.”

  “There’s also the issue of making Homo novus prolific enough so that they do end up taking over,” Jonathan said. “If we don’t tip the odds in their favor by removing some of the competition, then their numbers will never reach that critical mass.”

  “Given half a chance, somebody will probably try to come up with a version of Michael’s immune system which doesn’t incorporate our cooperation and empathy modifications,” Zoe said. “Which basically means Homo novus will lose all evolutionary advantage, and be lost to the world just as millions of other species have been.”

  I wondered where all this was going to end. I felt like I had gone crazy; lost all sense of what was right and wrong. The immensity of it helped in some ways to disassociate myself from it, to remove some of the personal guilt I felt; but sitting in this chair, listening to the way these people were talking, as if wiping out Homo sapiens entirely was a difficult but necessary step, was against everything I believed.

  What else could we do, though? If humans continued on as we were, we’d end up wiping out ourselves and everything else out along with us. Global warming had already passed the tipping point, and as much as I believed in science, even scientists weren’t going to be able to save the majority of the population now.

  They could have: eighty years ago, at the start of the century, there was probably still just enough time to limit the population or make the massive transition from dirty energy to clean alternatives. But we hadn’t been able to cooperate. Poor countries blamed rich countries for causing the problem, rich countries blamed poor countries for their over-population and rapid development, oil and coal barons went about happily selling their wares as they’d always done, and meanwhile the majority of the population was just too greedy or lazy or plain misinformed to do anything about it, despite the fact that they could have.

  It was a pity, really, at the start of the 21st century we had gotten so close to creating heaven on earth. A place where even eight billion people could have lived in relative peace and prosperity.

  “I have an idea,” I said, thinking that these people were starting to become just as ruthless as the military. If there was anything I’d learnt in the last few years it was that if we were going to change humanity we had to do it for the right reasons. We couldn’t change humanity because we hated ourselves, we had to change humanity because we loved ourselves. Because we were worth savin
g. Because, despite a few minor flaws in our genome which had led us down the wrong garden path, we were an incredible species. Probably the most incredible species to ever walk the planet. Not only that, we were the only species with the capacity to save both ourselves and all the others.

  “What’s your idea, Michael?” Bruno said.

  “Well, up until now we’ve kept our somatic modification of the mothers and our germline modification of the embryos separate. I think it’s time we joined the two. I also think that we could create a further somatic modification that would protect Homo sapiens from diseases that Homo novus might create.”

  “If we do that, how are we ever going to effect the changeover?” Frank said.

  “By integrating the changes to the eggs and sperm into our modification. If the modification does everything: alters the sex cells that so that any offspring are Homo novus, provides the necessary modifications to the reproductive system so that women can survive pregnancy, and protects against any viruses that the modified children might breed, then everybody will be happy. Homo novus will take over within a generation, and no parents will die from disease before their kids are old enough to fend for themselves.”

  Everyone sat there and looked at me.

  “I like it,” Bruno said, looking at me and smiling.

  “Why would people take it in the first place?” Frank said.

  “They’ll have to,” I said. “Their own desire for survival and procreation will be turned against them. They’ll be so worried that other people will be taking it, and that if they don’t take it then either they or their offspring will be wiped out by all the new diseases going around, that they’ll be forced to.”

  A few days later, I received a call from Dylan. The New Church leaders had decided they were willing to accept a few children on each of the havens. In total there were over one hundred havens, so there would be plenty of room for all of them.