The Relic Keeper

by Anderson, N David

  She let herself into the room she needed and looked up at the series of racks that held the ancient boxes packed with paper files dating from the previous century. Each was categorised into years, months, and then alphabetically by name within that. In theory you should be able to look up the name on the database, but that system had failed to exist years previously. With no current information on the year that she needed it was going to take a while. She walked along the rack looking at the files.

  “Well, Mathew died 14th June 1999, and Paula was alive then, so let’s start at June 1999,” she said to herself out loud. She took the box down and flicked through the files. Finding nothing she went to the next one, and then the next after that.

  There was not an entry for every month of year, and there were few names starting L in any of them, but even so it took four hours for Rei to work her way through the possible files in the archive room. Although she had no file for a Paula Lyal, she had found an extra six people put into cryonic suspension by Live Right. She made a note of their details on her c-pac and slipped the files back where they came from. So perhaps Paula was not here, or maybe she had changed her mind and cancelled suspension, although Mathew seemed to have been positive that she would be preserved.

  Rei had been expecting to find some evidence and was slightly unsure of what do in the lack of any. She looked at the six names on her c-pac. Could one of these be the file she was looking for? Was it possible that the name was changed? She could look at the present files for these and see if there was any correspondence. She accessed her patient file, input her pass-code, and asked for lists with the names in any files. A selection returned and she scanned them for anything that would help. Four of the names were listed as NIL DATA: EXCEPTIONAL ARCHIVE PATIENT: REGISTERED: NO ADMINISTRATION: NO FURTHER ACTION: DO NOT REMOVE FILE: Snr ADMINISTRATION Dr TM WARWICK. These must be the ones still held in suspension, she thought. Which left two people unaccounted for: Andrews, S T, and Palmer, M P S. She input the details into the system. The files for these were short. The message read: PATIENT REMOVED. ACCESS RESTRICTED, then listed the year of admission and the initials.

  “Removed to where?” she whispered looking at the notes. There was no date nor was there any indication of the whereabouts of the rest of the files. She deactivated her c-pac and left the cold grey room. She clicked the door shut and noticed the layers of dust that fell from the handle as it locked. As she walked back to the stair well she passed the lines of silent doors guarding the archives of decades of work. All of these were bolted shut as they had been for years, but as she approached one of the doors something struck her as strange. The handle was clean, and apart from the room she had just left, it was the only one that was. There was little reason to come down here; she had not even bothered to check that the area would be empty, yet this door had obviously been opened recently. She stared at the handle for a second, and even tried it in case it was open. It wasn’t. She checked her list of codes and found the one relating to the room. She input it and the latch clicked open. She instinctively checked the corridor, and then entered the room.

  Deon was glad to be inside the clinic, and kept a low profile. He pushed trolleys and wheeled equipment and patients between wards. Occasionally he’d stop to check that there was no more blood coming from his nose, or to take a painkiller. But mostly he did his work and hoped to leave soon. He’d spent half an hour getting cleaned up once he was inside, and now he focused on his duties.

  He hadn’t been expecting the greeting he’d received as he approached the clinic. At first he’d thought there had been a fire because of the people standing in the street outside the building, but as he came nearer he heard the chants and jeers aimed at staff entering.

  “What’s happening?” he’d asked an woman carrying a bag in one hand and hurling insults at the security guards who stood outside the large glass doors, uncertain what to do.

  “This is the place where they’ve got that man,” she shouted, although Deon was standing only a few feet away. “The one they brought back to life.”

  Deon played dumb, and asked if it wasn’t a great medical breakthrough.

  “Playing bloody God, those doctors are,” she shouted at him. “It’s bad enough that they decide who’s born, now they’re going to dictate whether or not we should die. That’s not their decision.”

  “You’re quite right, it’s not.” Deon looked around to see who had spoken and saw a short man of about 40 dressed in black. “This is not the sort of medical breakthrough that people should be striving for,” the man said in an accent that Deon thought didn’t suit his clothes. “Think about the money that could be spent on the deserving poor, instead of this creature. And consider his soul, ripped from wherever it was and forced to Earth for a doctor’s whim.”

  Deon faltered a little, he wasn’t sure what to say or do. This wasn’t how he saw the situation at all.

  “I suspect that they haven’t told him what they’ve done,” continued the man. “Let the departed rest in peace, that’s what I say.”

  “What if there’s a reason that he’s there, though?” suggested Deon. “Jesus brought Lazarus back, and he was resurrected himself from the dead.”

  “Well my friend,” said the man, “firstly, I don’t believe that this man is Jesus. Do you?”

  “Well no I’m not saying that, but…”

  “And secondly, what do you think happened to Lazarus when he was brought back, eh?”

  Deon had never thought of the consequences of a resurrection. He wondered what Caroline would do if she were still alive. She had always been an advocator of the preservation of life; surely she’d see the monumental importance of the miracle that had occurred here.

  “This man,” he said loudly, “has seen God; he’s passed through heaven and returned. Think of the things he could teach us.”

  The woman turned round to face him. “You’re as bad as they are,” she said pointing at the clinic. “Why don’t you just fuck off?” Deon looked around at the small crowd. These people, mostly middle-aged and, well, ‘normal’ looking, seemed so animated in their hatred. He felt nervous and alone, and wanted to leave. He wanted to be in the apartment away from these strange people. He could see the door to the clinic and the road that led away and he stood wondering which way to go. There was no help, no intervention, he felt trapped and confused, and the noise from the crowd started to become a cacophony of abstract sound. The people were more like animals, bound by the rules of the pack, and he was alone here amongst them, and if he didn’t move they’d turn on him. He could see the truth but they were blinkered. He remembered Caroline telling him that the non-believers would not see the truth, nor the evil of their ways. He could hear a sound, high-pitched above the cries of the pack around him, and he felt his body pushed as a cry went up. Vaguely, through the mist that fogged across his senses he could see the cordons of police charge the small crowd. He became slightly aware of the screams, the batons smashed against arms and skulls, the writhing figures trying to escape as the police kicked and punched them where they lay. A smear of something wet and red splashed on his hand and he stared at it, not comprehending. He felt a pain on his leg and then realised he was on the ground. He turned and a foot connected with his stomach and something hard smashed into his face. He half raised himself and felt another blow to his side, then a hand caught his shoulder. He tried to brush it away, but was unable to, and felt himself get dragged along the floor. He thrashed about trying to connect with something as someone held his arms down. And somewhere he heard a voice.

  “Jamie, you’re in the clinic. We’ve got you away from those lunatics. You’re safe.” He looked up at Troy, the security guard who’d dragged him from the mass of protesters, who were now being forced to the ground by the police.

  “I’m not with them,” Deon said.

  Troy looked at him strangely. “I know you’re not mate, you’re inside now. You’re safe. Ok?”

  Deon looked out at the carna
ge beyond the door. It was beginning; the end of days. It was soon going to be time to choose your path, he thought.

  It was not too hard for Rei to know where to start looking this time. Although the room was similar in layout to the first one, with walls covered with racks of files, the far end had been cleared and a small table set up. From the trails of dust around the floor and on the racking Rei could see that many of the files had been recently moved and presumably unboxed and read on the table. On the far side of the table was a cabinet, with a security device which clamped down the lid. She noticed that it was just big enough for the paper files to fit into. The lid was locked and she saw no way of opening it. She picked up the box and spun it over, but it was secured, although she could hear the files moving inside it. She looked around her and started to examine the boxes that appeared to have been moved. The files seemed to contain details about a number of vastly different patients, but all were recent. These should all have been logged on the clinic’s system, but for some reason were being stored as paper files in a locked room on a level that she thought had not been used in years. Reluctantly she started opening each in turn. There just may be some point of interest in one of these.

  Rei was about to stop her search. She’d been hauling through the files for nearly 3 hours and had not come across anything out of the ordinary. But something about this one struck her as familiar, although she didn’t realise why at first. She scanned the file with her c-pac and replaced it where she’d found it. It hadn’t been what she’d expected to find, but it must have some significance. She went onto the next file and carried on trawling through the remaining records, scanning what she needed before heading back to the apartment.

  She’d been trying to decide how to proceed and reluctantly came to the conclusion that she knew who the best person to speak to was. She connected through her c-pac.

  “Brading.”

  “Hello Mr Brading, I need to speak to you urgently.”

  “Hi Reiko, how are you? I was thinking of calling you to see if…”

  “Yes well never mind what you were thinking,” she said curtly, “it seems I need some help, and although it pains me to admit it, you may be the best person to supply me with the direction that I need for what I’m looking into.”

  Philip slipped off the bed where he’d been reading and focused his attention on the girl calling. He hadn’t expected Reiko to contact him at all, and the fact that she had meant that something was probably of major importance, or there’d been a disastrous calamity.

  “Sure, glad to help. What’s wrong? Has De…, er James been up to much?”

  “No idea, he’s been keeping a low profile the last couple of days. I think the protests today scared him, to be honest.”

  “Yeah,” said Philip, making a note to check the story on protests. He was slipping, he should have known what she was on about from the start. “So what is it?”

  “I’ve been checking the medical records. Not the official ones, understand, the more clandestine archives.”

  “Yeah yeah, secret medical files. Load.”

  “Well, I was looking for anyone other than Mathew who had been treated to posthumous near-absolute zero cryonic treatment, and two files were missing from the bulk store of the records. Then when I was checking for, well, for anything really, I came across a record which looked out of place. The details listed a 27-year-old Caucasian female with cardial arrhythmia and myocardial ischemia. The condition was treated with a course of the usual Beta-adrenergic blocking, which had…”

  “Hold on hold on. I don’t understand any of this. You’ve got a file about a patient with a heart defect, yeah?”

  “Yes,” snorted Rei, “that’s what I said. She had a, well, an irregular heartbeat, and a problem whereby there’s a lack of oxygen reaching the muscles that pump the heart.”

  “Ok, keep it at that level, I can understand it so far.”

  “So, they’ve treated her with a series of drugs that subdue the ventricular ectopy, because the beta-blockers have anti-arrhythmic properties and reduce myocardial oxygen demand by reducing heart rate and ventricular inotropy.”

  “Lost again.”

  “The cardiac muscles differ from the muscles around the bones of your body because of their cardiac inotropy. Basically, the way that they contract is different so that your heartbeat remains more stable when it’s exerted.”

  “Ok, so, this woman had a heart that beats irregularly, yeah?”

  “Yes! Anyway, that’s not the important part. She wasn’t reacting to the treatment properly, it happens sometimes, and instead of treating her through a different rate or type of beta-blocking drugs they replaced the defective area of the ventricular muscles.”

  “They gave her a heart transplant.”

  “Not as such, no, but they did replace the part that was working incorrectly. And this is the strange part. The transplanted part was genuinely human; not pseudogenetic, which is how it would normally be processed. But at the same time it doesn’t seem to have been cadaverously retrieved.”

  “No no, gone again.” He was beginning to think that this girl was just calling him up to make him feel stupid.

  “Most organs for transplants are synthetically manufactured, yes?”

  “Yeah, I know that.”

  “Well this one wasn’t. But it wasn’t retrieved from a recently deceased person either. And I know that because the file would have to reference the donor. A donor is a dead person whose body parts or organs have been used for medical…”

  “Yeah, I do know what that means. So where did it come from?”

  “The reference links the file to record P-MPS.2.5.2002. Now that file is one that I know. It was for a man named Mark P S Palmer, the second of May 2002 was the day he died and was brought to what is now the Walden Centre.”

  “And now you’re going to tell me that he was cryogenically treated like Mathew Lyal, yeah?”

  “Exactly. Although the process is cryopreservation, so it’s cryonically treated, not cryogenically.”

  “Yeah, either. So they’ve used 70 year old organs for transplants, right?” Now Philip was beginning to see his story really take shape.

  “No, not exactly.”

  “Well, what exactly then?”

  “That’s what I thought at first, but as I checked through more of the records I came across several other similar files. People treated for a host of congenital problems, and referenced back to two people, Andrews, S T, and Palmer, M P S. But there were too many people donated to, unless these two people had more than one heart each. The same body parts were being used repeatedly.”

  “So how’s that possible?”

  “Under normal circumstances obviously it isn’t.” She thought before continuing, “If you could revive a part of a person, from their tissue or DNA, for example, and create a living organ, or limb, it is possible, in theory at any rate, to graft it onto another person. You could theoretically make human organs to be used in place of the pseudogenetic, artificial ones. There was some research into it decades ago, but was declared illegal by the Ethics Commission in 2027. There was a rumour that some artificial parts companies put pressure on the Commission so as to keep their supplies running. But these people…well, they were dead before that came into effect, so I suppose that they could be used for genetic experimentation and DNA grafts, because they wouldn’t come under that section of the law.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “In layman’s terms, Philip, I think they’ve been growing body parts for transplants.”

  “You mean working on parts of real people?”

  “Yes. Totally illegal and unethical under normal circumstance.”

  “But you’re saying that the people that were being experimented on had been dead for seventy odd years.”

  “That’s what I think. I don’t know the details pertaining to the law. I’m not even sure if there are any. It may be covered under copyright law, but with 70 years since death that won�
��t take effect. There is no precedent for any of this.”

  “So why would they want to do this in the first place?”

  “Pseudogenetics is highly in demand, but expensive and takes a long time to work with. The nano-technology involved is developing in Asia, but here in the West we’re quite a way behind, it might take another 20 years for Europe to be where East and South East Asia is now. Many people still travel to Mexico to have transplants because they are cheaper there, even though they often, well, let’s just say appropriate the parts they need from unwilling donors. If anyone could discover an alternative it would be a major breakthrough. The kudos is amazing, and the stock prices would soar.”

  “Which is a bit weird,” said Philip, thinking out loud. “’Cos Warwick’s busy selling shares at the moment.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, I know. Not if he intends announcing it, at any rate. When did these ops take place?”

  “All of them were performed about 2 years ago. They had a period of 4 months when, as far as I can ascertain, they undertook about 12 of them. They were all double-blinded; none of the patients know what was done, nor did the surgeons from what I can see. It’s only because of the pharmacovigilance records that I know about them. The operational records, they are the ones that would prove absolutely what happened, they are all held as classified, but somehow the cross-referencing failed to classify some associated records.”

  “Who would know about this?”

  “Well, us now. Otherwise, Warwick, whoever discovered the process itself, that couldn’t be many people here. Maybe only three people in the country, and only one associated with the clinic, Dr Malik. It is quite possible that the doctors involved in the operations did not fully understand where the organs were from, which would be in keeping with the double-blinded classification. Providing that I’m correct in this of course, and I have no proof.”