Claire, sighed, swiping over the emails to slowly delete them, "Kit, there is a lot I have to tell you." She looked up at me, her eyes were sad, but held honesty, "When I tell you everything, it will change everything. I live a complicated life, many layers to keep those around me safe while putting myself at the center of the bullseye." She took a steadying breath, "I wanted to wait until we were further along." She paused, handing back the phone.
I took it, shrugging, "What could be more complicated than last night. We are complicated, I think I proved that when I kissed you." I felt my breath catch in my lungs when I uttered the words. She had such an incredible effect on me that it would always complicated things until the day I quit caring about the fine line between employer and employee and let my heart go.
Claire folded her arms and looked at the edge of the counter, ignoring my statement, "The simplest way to explain those emails and my work is that yes, most of the world and my enemies on both sides of the law think I am playing god." She turned slowly, her eyes meeting mine in the way that I knew she was baring another layer of her for me, "But it is far more than that, Kit." She dropped her arms, turning to walk out of the bathroom, "If you want to know everything, I will be in my office in the basement. I have some damage control to start on." Claire looked over her shoulder, "Only come down there if you want to know, because I swear on my life. The moment you know everything, everything will change."
Claire smiled tightly, returning to her path out of the bathroom, leaving me alone in a quiet marble bathroom, wondering how much more complicated could things between us, get.
I took a minute before I reached for my ice pack. Carrying it in my fingers as I left the bathroom, heading to the stairs that would take me to the basement.
What else did I have to lose?
Chapter 11
My mother used to always say, "Every journey worth having is full of complications and trouble around every turn." A handful of words that never made too much sense for a girl who lived her life planned to the moment and calculated all risk before jumping in. Now I sat in my office years after my mother first handed down that advice, reading over Ivan's reports on the firewall breach sitting in a pile of complicated trouble.
The extremist group was pushing harder in the last few months, and I had to wait for the last couple of days on Ivan and the Secret Service to finally tell me exactly which group it was.
A few years ago I had a random church down in the Deep South send me threatening letters and packages. That all stopped when the FBI and the NSA paid them a visit to their front porches with warrants for domestic terrorist threats.
This new extremist group was hard to pinpoint due to their taste for hired guns and disposable equipment. An army of ex-cons who needed to make a quick buck and vehicles that were traced back to no one or random store fronts. They were part one of the trouble.
Part two of the trouble was the CIA and the outer fringe group of the NSA who had a deep particular interest in my work at the Criterion Centre. At first they were slightly inquisitive which turned into them getting one small piece of intelligence from Emiliana's case, now they were rabid for more information and how to utilize my research work to benefit them. The phrase super soldier, no matter how cliché it was, was being tossed around on a daily basis in communiques and other briefings Rebecca and Ivan snagged from the federal communication network.
I leaned on the edge of my desk, the extremists and the two government agencies were the trouble, Kit was the complication. I never had the slightest intention that I would fall into a relationship or fall into anything with another human being for an indefinite amount of time. I was a self-proclaimed workaholic and no one ever intrigued me to want to be a human, want to crave the basic human need of finding love. I was happy just eating, breathing, drinking water, and living solely on those three basic life needs.
But here I was now, sitting waiting for Kit to show up as I knew she would, she was far too inquisitive herself and far too smart to ignore the emails dumping into her phone. Emails that I was mildly mortified they had slipped through and landed in her mailbox, even Rebecca had no idea about the full extent of my work contained in those emails. Yes, she knew of my work since she was also a patient of mine, but the truth of how her life was saved, I couldn't bring myself to tell her.
My eyes were closed, I had a headache brewing and my heart began to feel like it would seize up. I had not discussed religion nor science with Kit, what her thoughts on the two separately were and if they collided like most of the worlds did, like two semi-trucks on a one lane road. If Kit was like most of the world, she would change her opinion of me as I laid it out to her.
Our complicated relationship would become more complicated and distant.
I did trust Kit to not leave the job after I filled her on what the Criterion Centre and I were doing, she would just shut me out and keep it to business only. The few inches I let my heart out were already too many.
I took a deep breath and admitted it to myself, I wanted Kit. I wanted her on a level that I never wanted anyone else. I wanted to be next to her any chance I could. I wanted to hold her hand. I wanted her to continue to make up silly lies to excuse her need to sleep in the same bed as me. I wanted to spend sunny afternoons with her at Paco's.
I wanted a chance to have something more with her.
I groaned and opened my eyes, focusing on the monitors. I sucked in a deep breath when I heard Kit come down the stairs and knock lightly on the cracked door. I would have to play this by ear as to how far my walls would need to come up.
I turned to the door and saw her half standing in the doorway. I waved her in, "You can take a seat. I just have a few more things to send back to Erich and Ivan. Then we can talk."
Kit nodded and stepped into the office, closing the door behind her. I glanced at her as she scanned around the room, obviously taking in the massive technology hub I had created. The office was much larger than the one Rebecca and her used. The monitors were stacked six deep and the room was dark enough to allow the eye to adjust and not be strained. The entire office looked like an evil genius lair. I smirked at the idle thought; I had been called an evil genius in the past few years.
Kit pulled up the rolling chair and sat next to me. I took note that she did roll the chair closer than polite etiquette would dictate, giving me small hope. Leaning on the armrest with her good arm, she commented quietly, "The last time I saw a room like this it was in the basement intelligence section of MI6. Yours looks newer."
I nodded, clicking send on the last few emails I had, "It is newer. I upgrade the systems completely every year and the computers themselves are always in a rotating state of equipment upgrade." I turned to look at her, "My work down here always needs to be one step ahead of everyone." Her hazel eyes had not changed, she still looked at me the way she did when she silently asked me to stay in the bed with her. It made me swallow hard and look away, this was going to be harder than I thought when it all fell apart in the next hour.
"And what exactly is your work, Claire?" Her voice was monotone, doing her best to keep any anger or accusations out of the tone.
I sighed, pointing to the monitor closest to her, "Watch that screen and I will explain as things come up." I paused and turned to her again, “Kit, I need you to understand that what you will hear next. It's all for the best and has nothing to do with making money. It's all about saving people who deserve more from life than what their genetics handed them." I held her eyes, "I have no desire to replace whatever god anyone believes in. I just wanted to improve on how we heal and advance human life."
Kit fidgeted, placing a new ice pack on her shoulder, "That sounds rather ominous."
I shrugged, "To many, I am ominous. I'm dangerous, evil, a harlot of science." I looked up at the ceiling, "And a hundred other creative and hurtful terms or phrases."
I hit the enter button, filling the screen I had directed Kit to look at with images and scrolling genetic code.
>
I leaned back in my chair as she leaned forward. "This is the closest to the final product of the research I have been doing since I was twenty-three and first met Dr. Erich Zehren on a visit to the Criterion Centre. The Avondale family has supported the Centre since it was a small clinic to help refugees during World War II."
I watched as her eyes darted quickly around the screen. I folded my hands in my lap, "Do you have a basic understanding of DNA and the cloning of DNA, Kit?"
She nodded slightly, "I know enough to get me through biology courses. Cloning, I only know a little bit from the stem cell research debates I had listened to other Senators gripe about." Kit looked at me sideways, "I know that you can grow new skin and small livestock through cloning. After that, I chose to focus on other things in the news that were related to my job."
I smiled tightly, looking back at my hands, I was getting nervous, "Fair enough."
Kit scooted closer to the screen as the lungs were replaced by Rebecca's heart. The same dissection program I had fiddled with a few days ago repeating itself. The heart was dissected, rotating on the screen while more genetic code filled the open spaces, "Claire is this what all of this is? Is it cloning?"
I nodded curtly, "Yes and no. Cloning is a process where you are introducing other cells and growing replicates of whatever it is you are trying to grow." I swung in the chair, reaching for another stack of my work notebooks, "When I started this project, it was just out of mild boredom in life. Erich had presented me with a few research opportunities in his own work. He was initially working on a cloning project along the lines of livestock. He thought that pigs would work best since they are the closest to humans and wanted to find the ultimate key of life to unlocking the secrets of genetics. Human genetics."
I gripped onto the notebooks in my hand, looking at Kit as she kept her eyes on the length of my work floating over the screens, one image at a time, "I started reading his work, trying to find better ways to grow replacement skin for burn victims that would take to the wound quickly and speed up the overall healing process. Cut down the time and the excruciating pain all patients suffered through."
I set the notebooks down in front of Kit, "The method I focused on was induced pluripotent stem cells. The stem cells that have the ability to differentiate into any of the three germ layers. Endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm." I sat back in the chair, "Not to bore you with even more specifics, but you could use the adult cells of your choice with genes that are known as reprogramming factors and turn them into pluripotent cells. Manipulation to follow the selection, and one could start a regrowth process. Sadly, over the last many years, this has not proven to be successful. Problems with activating cancer cells during the process and just overall failure of the growth product has left many scientists in a loop of mystery."
I reached over and clicked again, my original notes filling the screen. "I began playing with pluripotent stem cells and the basic idea behind reproduction. The splitting of one cell into another and another until a fetus was created. I started to realize that with enough manipulation of the two ideas, I could grow skin as well as viable organs. After furthering the work with my formulas, I had ideas of splitting apart the genetic code and replicating it perfectly. Soon I found I could create formulas that could literally reproduce a human’s original organ. An organ that could not be deciphered from the original one from birth if they sat next to each other."
I chewed on my lip for a second, "I was also recoding the organs and removing the faults caused by genetic predisposition to heart disease, cancer or a slip up in chromosomes. Anything illness that could be caused by inherited genetics. The goal was to regrow a perfect working organ free of disease or faulty parts." I was speaking quickly, excited by discussing my passion mixed with the fear that if I stopped talking for too long, Kit would leave the room and not look back.
Kit turned slowly to look at me, "You mean that you are cloning organs?" Her voice was firm, telling me that her question was not a just a question, but a statement where she already knew the answer.
I half smiled, "I was, but when you pull apart a cloned organ there are still small genetic differences that would clue any geneticist in that it was not original. Which also led to the growth attempts failing. The body would take to the organ like a transplant and reject it in time. I wanted my new organs to be undetectable and absolutely perfect. Perfect and brand new as the day you were born and your entire body was free of the hell we eventually all put it through by drinking, smoking, eating poor foods."
I stood up, pulling a thick binder of tests I had run over the last ten years, "These are all of my failures, ten years of trial and error." I swiped a hand over the thin layer of dust on the front black plastic cover. "Until I began doing full recoding of a patients organ and copying it. I would then add steroids and growth hormones in mild doses to increase the rate of growth. It worked but the organ would only get so far before it began to perish." I sat back down in the chair, watching Kit flip through dusty pages of my scribbled notes.
"Then I stumbled upon a technique some doctors use when they reattached a limb. Take a thumb for example, its amputated and then reattached. The doctor would cut a pouch into the patients stomach and sew the thumb into the pouch, giving the digit a very healthy and nutrient rich place to heal, grow new tissue." I took a deep breath, pausing to see if Kit was still actively listening. She was, staring dead in my eyes and focused on every word I spoke. It made my heart skip and throat dry up at the same time.
I turned away from her, pulling my hair into a pony tail, "I thought if I could get the new organ to grow a few days, then implant it on top of the old one and establish a symbiotic connection between the two. The new organ would feed off the old, absorbing nutrients while it grew rapidly. Eventually sucking the life out of the old organ. Allowing it to shrivel up and disappear into the body's natural waste system. Eventually discarded like liquids or solids that travel throughout the body."
I tapped on the tablet in front of me, pulling up Emiliana's lungs and began moving my fingers over the image that was also on the monitor in front of Kit. "All I had to do was pull apart the genetic code like a zipper." I drew my fingers down the code that appeared around the organ, separating it. "Then I find the weak points, flick them out." I flicked my fingers over the defective sections of the strand on the screen, making them dissolve. "Replace those with strong healthy sequences and let proverbial nature take course." I pushed the newly formed sections together on the screen, double tapping the screen to zoom out the image, I smiled weakly, "Added my own brand of vitamin water and let it go."
Kit's mouth opened slightly as she looked down at the binder in front of her and back to the screen, rubbing at her eyes, "Does, did it work?"
I folded my arms, "It did. All of the tests worked perfectly." I took a slow breath, "Emiliana, Paco's wife, was the first patient, willingly of course. She had fallen ill last year and in a short few months she became terminally ill with stage three lung cancer. Paco and Emiliana had resigned that it was her fate, regardless of the fact she had not smoked a day in her life or been around it, and yet she carried the diseased lungs of a person who smoked three packs a day from the age of nine until fifty."
I smiled lightly at the memory of the day I asked Paco and Emiliana if they would be interested in my help.
"She was my first patient, and very eager to find anything that could give her a few more months. Paco and her didn't care about what I was doing, messing with natural selection and the laws of man. They only wanted a few more months to go home and see South America one more time before she succumbed to her illness."
Kit turned in the chair, setting the ice pack on the floor. The air in the office growing thick with tension, she was oddly silent, staring at me and the screens intensely. I could not get a read on her, albeit I was beyond nervous and felt the sadness of what I was losing each minute I revealed the truth to her.
I took what felt like the fortieth deep breath of t
he last hour, "Emiliana obviously survived. She will live a normal life, see her golden years with Paco and then follow a natural course with her life." I drifted off, I didn't want to seem dark in the moment, I truly was only giving people a few extra years. I had yet to test out a full organ replacement that would give anyone an extra hundred years in addition to the lot they’ve already lived. I mumbled the rest of the procedure, thinking Kit had stopped listening.
"I was able to regrow her a brand new set of lungs in less than a week. Her old ones feeding the new organ only the critical nutrients while I boosted the process with the final set of steroids and hormones Erich and I whittled down to being most compatible."
I suddenly grinned, remembering the first deep breath of fresh Geneva air Emiliana took with her new lungs. She laughed in between the tears, squeezing me in the biggest bear hug I would ever receive. "Emiliana has been breathing better than she did at the age of twenty with a pair of lungs barely a year old. They are disease free and genetically perfect, and genetically all hers, no signs of replication or cloning anywhere in her body."
I tapped once more on the tablet, pulling up a video of the whole growth process recorded from a small camera Dr. Zehren and I had installed after we set the new organ on her old set of lungs. I clicked play and in time lapse, both Kit and I watched Emiliana's new lungs grow while the old ones shriveled up and wilted away. "This project has also led to new processes that I am still working on, processes that will make healing a matter of blinking the eye and it’s done."
I turned to look at Kit now that my rant had come to the end, she was staring at the screen, absolutely mesmerized by everything I had shown her, I felt lighter and heavier at the same time. Outside of Dr. Zehren and I, no one knew the full extent of my research like Kit now did. Rebecca found out by default when I sat with her in the hospital and asked her if she wanted a new heart.
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