“Good. Just hold on. You’re going to be fine.”
Justin was in the lab, where I knew he’d be, working with a number of other people. I was in such a panic it was hard to focus. My heart rate, according to my com, was over a hundred.
“Annie’s having a negative reaction to the bio-vectors,” I whispered to Justin.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know. Come with me.”
We went into my office and accessed the results that Annie had just sent me. Thankfully she’d been at the clinic where they had an AutoAnalyzer.
“It looks like the engineered T-cells are killing too many cells too rapidly,” I said. “She’s having a shock response.”
“How is that possible? Our trials with the macaques were perfect.”
“I have no idea, but we have to stop it.”
“We should give it another day. It might just be a period of adjustment.”
“My wife could die.” I knew that Justin was even more desperate for this to work than I was.
“If we don’t get this to work, Penny is going to die.” Justin stood there and shook his head.
I held onto him for a few moments, but then I needed to call Annie. Justin slumped down into the chair.
On the third ring, Annie answered and I could hear the panic but also the exhaustion in her voice.
“What should I do, Michael?”
“You’re going to have to disable the new genes as we discussed.”
“So that’s it, then? It’s not going to work?”
“No.” I was frightened but angry too. Angry at myself. Angry at life itself for allowing this to happen. Then I realized how irrational that was and my mind started working away on other possible solutions, my heart racing and my chest tight as I wondered what to do next. This couldn’t be the end of it. There was no way. Maybe if we could germline modify some children as we were trying to do before the military bought us out then we could use them to culture natural killer cells and also clone out genes for antibodies which would recognize HIV-4 more quickly. But that was going to take years.
“What are we going to do now, then?” Annie said.
“I don’t know.”
“I’d better go. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”
“Is there anyone there with you?”
“Yes. Simone and Derek are here.”
“Okay, let me know as soon as anything changes.”
“I will. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Twenty minutes later, the longest twenty minutes of my life, Annie called me back and told me they had administered the failsafe inducer. It would be hours before we knew what the outcome would be. I wanted to be there with her, but by the time I got there it would all be over: for better or for worse.
I went back to my room, and Annie and I spent the next few hours talking to one another. Neither wanted to hang up, in case it was the last conversation we had. I felt as if by staying on the line with her I was somehow keeping her alive.
Around 3am, she told me that Derek had come in to run some more tests on her. Half an hour later she called again and told me it appeared they’d gotten to her in time. The chemical trigger had shut down the new genes, and her immune system was starting to function normally again.
The only problem was: normal wasn’t enough to cure her.
The next day I watched a report on the Indonesian situation. Indonesian troops were moving into the north of Australia. The military was there trying to stop more boats from landing, but there were too many of them and the area was too large.
Would the Indonesians really go to the extent of releasing the virus? It would be the end of civilization as we knew it. The start of a whole new era of total mistrust between countries and territories. It was almost inevitable, though. There simply wasn’t enough food left to feed everybody. People were going to die. Lots of people. It was only a matter of who.
One night, around 3am, I heard a soft knock on my door and got up quickly to open it. Justin was standing there with his nose red and his eyes bloodshot.
“What’s wrong?”
“Penny died,” he said.
I put my arms around him and pulled him to me while he cried. Then I invited him in and he spent the night telling me all about their childhood together, how she’d always been the strong one and had stood up for him in school. They hadn’t seen each other much in the last few years, as he had been so busy trying to find a cure for her.
The following day Justin left for the city to be with his family. I told him to take as long as he wanted, but he told me he’d be back by the end of the week. Penny was the only member of his family he really loved.
We continued our testing of the immune systems of the prisoners but the results still weren’t conclusive.
“How are things going?” Savage came into the lab one afternoon.
“From everything we can gather, it seems all bar two of our test subjects would survive the virus,” Kate said.
“What does that mean?” Savage said.
“It means that some people’s systems respond better to the modifications than others’. We’re trying to work out what the factors are, but it could take us weeks if not months. This is the human body we’re dealing with here, not some kind of mechanical toy.”
“So what are our options? Modify all our men and hope for the best, knowing that there’s a chance twenty percent of them will die?”
“With such a small sample size it’s impossible to know what the overall result is going to be,” Kate said. “You can’t just snap your fingers and make this stuff work, you know?”
“Well, I guess it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing.” Savage smiled in a way that didn’t mean he thought this was funny.
Over the next few weeks we made some minor adjustments to our modifications and conducted more tests on them. Things improved, but still weren’t perfect, so we adjusted again until eventually we decided we were about as close as we were going to get.
More and more reports came in about the Indonesian invasion of northern Australia. It wasn’t only Australia they were attacking — they’d already taken over parts of Malaysia and Thailand too. And this only added to all the other wars that were already going on around the world. The company that now owned most of California, Glocome, was invading Mexico and Guatemala, and a Japanese multinational had recently declared war on south eastern Brazil, which was now its own territory run by a right-wing dictator. England and France were under attack by a North African alliance, and eastern Europe was slowly being eaten up by the Middle East. Apart from that, in almost every country, civil wars were raging, or gangs were fighting other gangs for what remained of resources.
One day I came into the clinic and all of the patients had gone.
“What happened to them?” I said to Kate.
“They’ve been moved,” Kate said.
“Moved to where?”
“Bio-safety level four.”
My heart almost stopped. “What for?” I said, although I already knew the answer.
“We’re going to infect them with Rebola.”
I stood there and stared at her, gripping onto the bench top by my side to stop myself from collapsing.
“That’s illegal.”
“They’re classifying it as capital punishment,” Kate said. “They are terrorists after all.” There was a cynical tone to her voice that sickened me. Did she really not care?
“I can’t allow it.”
Kate stared at me with a blank expression. Then she furrowed her eyebrows, shook her head, and went back to her work. “There’s nothing we can do, Michael. If you say anything you’ll be arrested.”
My heart was pounding by now and suddenly the feeling that I had always lived with, that I was in a country with a fair and reasonable government who would do the best by its citizens, was completely undermined. They were now our enemy. Not to be trusted, but not to be messed with either. Like some
medieval king, they had complete and utter power. The organizations that once kept them under control — the United Nations, Amnesty International — hardly even existed any more.
At that moment, Savage came into the room.
“What the hell’s going on?” I said to him.
“We need your cooperation on this, Michael. This virus is about to be released in our country and we have to find out right now exactly how good our modifications are.”
“We’ve already told you. The tests are very accurate.”
“Ninety percent isn’t enough. That’s ten percent of the population we’re talking about, Michael. Do you want ten percent of the population to die because your tests weren’t accurate enough?”
“No, of course not. We can continue testing, though. Improve the process. Get a better picture.” Inside I was ready to break down and plead with him but I knew that wouldn’t help anybody. The General was a man of war. Killing for him was a way of life. He did it with the same ease a butcher slaughtered animals.
“I can’t be a part of this,” I said.
“The military does not take lightly to traitors,” Savage said.
I closed my eyes for a minute and suddenly realized that the world had gone mad and that there was almost nothing I could do about it. Refusing to help would only make things worse. The best I could do was continue on and hope that either our modifications saved those men or there was something else we could do to help them if they didn’t.
So, this was what war was like? People who were completely unprepared, either psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually, were forced to go out and kill other people who were equally unprepared.
I wondered if I would reach a point where it all just became more of the same. I remembered a pig farmer who’d once told me that the first kill was the worst, but that after that you got numb to it, even started to enjoy it. He’d made me sick at the time, but I wondered if maybe he was right. I’d become immune to killing mice, even monkeys sometimes. Maybe I could do the same with humans.
Every year over two hundred thousand animals were used in medical trials. People liked to think that their medicines came cruelty-free, but the truth was that a lot of suffering was caused by the research that went into them. Testing on humans still felt wrong, but why should we value human life over animal life? Was there really any difference? What was the difference between a human being and a fully grown adult chimpanzee? Thousands of whom had died or suffered in captivity in medical trials.
Kate led me through to bio-safety level four. We suited up and went into a long room where all of the men were inside quarantine bubbles. Thankfully they were sedated. Each bubble had an external IV line and a colostomy bag coming out of it.
Kate put the virus into the first man’s drip, Adam. I stood there, my heart running a marathon, and hoped to hell it was going to work. Kate infected all of the men in the same way, including Ghanim, and then her and I and about ten nurses monitored them constantly.
Apart from the IV bags going in we had lines coming out so we could collect constant blood samples. We ran their blood through the AutoAnalyzer and after four hours our immune system modifications seemed to be doing their job. The rate of spread of the virus within the bloodstream was minimal.
Then, just as I was starting to relax and breathe normally again, believing that everything was going to be okay, a nurse called me over to Ghanim’s bed. He was struggling to breathe and blood was dripping from his mouth and nose. There was nothing I could do but stand there and watch as his body twitched and strained against the fate before it. I felt as if my own body were dying. I felt myself struggling inside, twisting and wanting to wrench myself apart.
And then, finally, he lay still.
I started trembling, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to control myself. I went outside, through the washer, and then struggled to get out of my suit. I ran down the corridor, my fists clenched and ready to smash into anything, smash into my own body if they had to. I pushed open the door of the bathroom with so much force it crashed against the wall behind it. The sound reverberated down the empty corridor.
I locked myself in a stall and knelt down on the floor. I started pummeling the wall with both of my fists. I wanted to smash my head too and only just managed to stop myself from doing so. I hit the walls, the floor, the hard porcelain bowl of the toilet. When I couldn't take the pain any longer I thudded my fists against my own thighs, and then I kept on bashing; my right hand, thud, thud, thud, leaving red stains on the wall; my left hand over my face, which was half-blinded by tears.
All my life, I had hated those people who had killed my father, and now here I was, having done exactly the same. Although Ghanim was a convicted terrorist, what he was trying to do to our country was nothing worse than what our country and its allies had been doing to his for decades. My father had always had a love-hate relationship with the West. Although he supported the idea of a capitalist democracy, he said that too often it was propped up by exploitation of other countries like his own.
I thought back to how I had felt after my parents’ death, so scared and so angry. I had hated myself. The day before they had disappeared, I had fought with them, screaming at them from my room because I had wanted to continue playing with my cousin, Salim, but they had forced me to come inside and do my homework instead. That morning, the morning they had died, I had been surly and had hardly spoken to them. If I hadn’t been like that, I thought at the time, they might have taken me to school like they sometimes did instead of making me take the bus. And if they had taken me to school, they might not have been in the same place as that missile.
I realized now, for the first time, that it wasn’t my fault. That it was someone else’s fault. Someone like me, right this minute, making a conscious decision which had killed somebody. I felt so sick then that I started vomiting. I emptied the contents of my stomach into the toilet and then I kept dry retching until I could hardly breathe. I stood up and went to the sink and blew vomit out of my nose and wiped it away from my mouth and chin. I looked at myself in the mirror but I could hardly recognize the person looking back at me. That was somebody else. Somebody I used to be. It certainly wasn’t the person I was now.
A few weeks later, the news that we’d been dreading came through. In the space of a few days, almost half of Darwin was wiped out by the Rebola virus.
That night, I called Annie.
“I think you should come and live on the base here with me,” I said. “Things are getting too dangerous out there.”
“I don’t think it was the Indonesians who set that virus off,” Annie said.
“What do you mean?”
“I think it was us. I think it was Australian forces.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I have a friend in Jakarta. They’re claiming it was the Australians who released it. Most of the Indonesian troops were wiped out, and it was only the Australian soldiers who survived.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING, I switched the audio recorder on my com on, in case I ever needed a recording of this, and stormed in to General Savage’s office.
“That virus was ours, wasn’t it?” I said to him.
Savage looked at me out of deep blue eyes, unwavering, and said nothing.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“Close the door, Michael. Sit down.”
I stood there for a minute, hesitating, and then I realized I had no choice.
“Michael, I’m going to get right to the point.” Savage folded his hands in front of him. “Things are bad out there. Way worse than they tell you. And it’s going to get worse. Much worse. No holds barred. Whoever wins this one is going to do whatever the hell they like to the people living in the countries they conquer. Releasing that virus was our only option.”
“So it was ours, then?”
“Yes.”
“Why weren’t we informed?”
“It was classified informat
ion, Michael, and if any part of this conversation finds its way out of this room then you’re going to be arrested, do you understand me?”
I nodded, wondering if there was any way he could detect my recorder.
“The Indonesians are better armed than us, Michael, and there are a hell of a lot more of them. If this had gone on any longer they would have taken over the whole God damn country. Is that what you want? Indonesia taking over our country?”
“No, obviously not.” I wondered if any of what he was saying was true.
“Good. Now, while you’re here, I might as well share a little bit more classified information with you. Part of the reason we tested the virus out in Darwin was because we needed to know how well it would work and how well your vaccine worked.”
My chest ached. I couldn’t believe that I had been a part of what had happened. How many innocent civilians had been killed?
“And the good news,” Savage continued, “is that on both fronts we were fairly successful.”
“How many civilians were killed?” I said, not really wanting to know the answer but needing to anyway.
“None. Most of them were evacuated before Indonesia even attacked, and the rest got out shortly afterwards. Which is why it was the perfect test site. Combined with the fact that it’s so remote, and that the virus works so quickly, means — touch wood — that it hasn’t escaped.”
I looked down at the floor. I realized now I couldn’t trust a word he was saying, but what choice did I have? Obviously the media was being far more controlled than I had ever believed possible. There were no doubt a few dark-net forums that were still telling the truth, but even they would be shut down faster than new ones could pop up again. It wasn’t easy staying alive these days — it was in very few people’s moral fibre to make it even harder for themselves.
“Are you okay, Michael? Because this is a war here, son, and in war people die. Lots of people. There’s not much we can do about that.”
Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) Page 14