“Thank God you’re okay.” Gilda stood up when she saw us and hugged us.
“Where’s Sam?” Annie said.
“Inside, sleeping,” Gilda said, and I felt my insides slump and a tiredness the likes of no other come over me.
“Where’s Boon?” Gilda said.
“I don’t know,” Annie said. “We got separated. I was hoping he had come back here.”
“No,” Gilda said. “Not yet.”
Annie and I decided to try to get back through the gates and go home. We were both exhausted, Annie especially, and she was starting to cough in a way which frightened me. She wanted to stay and help clean up, but I insisted we leave.
As we neared the gates, we were stopped by an army squad about a kilometer out.
“You can’t go any further,” one of them said to us through our broken window, holding a rifle at the ready.
“We live in the regulated zone,” I said. “We got caught here.”
“I’m sorry sir, but nobody’s going in or out for a week at least.”
“I work for the military,” I said. “Contact General Savage and ask him if you should let me through.”
“I’m sorry sir, I have my orders.”
“Listen, you can either let me through, or you can explain to the General how you were responsible for the death of one of his top scientists, Michael Khan.”
He looked at me. “Just a moment, sir.” He walked across to his group commander.
The commander came across to me with a retina scanner.
“Michael Khan?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Just look in here please.” He held the scanner up to my eye and waited a moment for the results, then said, “We’re very sorry sir, please go on through. I’ll let the guys up ahead know you’re on your way.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re lucky,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“They’re about to napalm the whole place.”
“What?”
“Yes. The Indonesians made a real mess of things. They’re going to napalm it before the rats start spreading.”
Annie gripped onto my arm. “We have to go back for Gilda and Sam,” she whispered.
“When is it going to start?” I said.
“In about an hour,” the officer replied. “You’d better get moving.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
ON THE DRIVE back into the city my whole body was raw and shaking. I felt as if I personally was responsible for the deaths of all those people. Annie was in the seat next to me, coughing, breathing with difficulty. If it hadn’t been for her, I would have wanted to kill myself. I no longer deserved to live. I imagined myself dying from Rebola, blood pouring out of my nose and mouth, choking me. That is what I deserved. That is what I wanted to happen. How could I be alive when all those people were dead or about to die?
When we got into the city, Annie was coughing so much we went straight to the hospital.
“You’ve got pneumonia,” the doctor told us when she came in with the results. “Due to your HIV-4, you’ll have to be admitted.”
Visiting hours were over so they didn’t let me stay. I climbed back into the car and asked it to take me home.
It felt strange to open the door and walk into our empty house alone, and I felt a shiver run down my back as I closed the door onto the dark hallway. I curled up on our sofa. The sky outside was dark with smoke and the horizon glowed orange like sunset. Ashes started raining down upon the windows. I imagined the inferno that was choking, suffocating, scorching everything and everybody in its path. I thought about Gilda and Sam, how despite all they’d been through they had still been still strong, hopeful… I could only hope that they died quickly, but I knew that probably wasn’t going to be the case. They were going to die in agony, like everyone else we had tried to save.
For a long time I just sat there, my body turned to a lump of flesh, every nerve exposed as if I’d been flayed. My mind fell into a dark abyss of depression, thoughts barely registering. I imagined fire coming in through the windows, the intensity of the heat, the pain as my skin and hair seared. I tried to cover myself, put my arms over my head to protect myself, but I couldn’t breathe. For a few minutes I held my breath, hoping that I could end it, that it would stop, that I would faint and never wake up, but my body fought against me.
The next morning when I walked into the hospital, I felt as if I was a passenger inside my own body, watching it go about its routine but having no control over or connection to it. I said hello to the nurses on Annie’s ward but it was as if someone else were saying hello to them. And the way they greeted me back, their eyes and smiles huge and distorted, frightened me. They seemed totally unaware of what had just happened. I felt like I’d walked into a different reality — one in which a third of the population hadn’t just been annihilated. For a moment I wondered if I was going crazy, if maybe it hadn’t actually happened.
Then I walked in to Annie’s room. She opened her eyes briefly and looked at me, but neither of us said anything. There was nothing we could say. I sat down on the bed beside her and took her hand, but she closed her eyes and within seconds she was back asleep; her mind unable to bear it. I stared at a poster on the wall of Annie’s room that said “A smile a day keeps the doctor away” with a yellow smiley face on it, but it meant absolutely nothing. Anything human that had once existed inside me, anything nice or beautiful or happy, had been erased. The only thing I could feel was a total contempt for all things human, and a strong desire to revenge myself against those who had been responsible for what had happened. I hated myself, I hated the military, the government, and I hated every other person in the regulated zone — either for their stupidity, like mine, at not knowing what their government was capable of, or for their complicity if they did know.
There were only two things that kept me going: my wife, who I still cared about, and the overriding thought that I was going to change humanity. We had destroyed our environment and now we had turned our destructive nature upon ourselves. What would be left when we had finished? The same thing that was left on Easter Island after they’d chopped down every last tree and eaten every last bird and mammal — the mauled bones of each other?
The next few days were a blur of going in and out of the hospital. Then finally, Annie was able to come home, and I picked her up.
I was sitting in my office that night when Annie came in.
“Gilda and Sam are alive!” she said to me.
“What? How?”
“I just got a call from Gilda. Apparently Boon went for them. He was given warning, and the rebels had bunkers in case the army attacked. A couple of hundred people survived.”
Tears of happiness welled up inside of me. I couldn’t believe it, and when my shock passed I stood up and hugged Annie tightly.
That night I lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, Annie by my side. It was 3am but I was unable to sleep. The thought of Gilda, Sam, Boon and the others all being alive cut through to my cold, empty heart like a scalpel. Not everything was hopeless. Not everything was lost.
I thought back to a time before my parents had died, when we’d gone to the beach for the first time in my life. Iraq was almost entirely land-locked, so we’d gone over to Turkey for a holiday. We’d arrived at night, and my parents had gotten me up early the next morning to walk down to the water with them.
The sun still hadn’t risen as we crunched across the sand and watched the gentle waves breaking. We took off our shoes and played the game of trying to chase the ocean, running after it when it retreated and then running for our lives when it came after us again.
Then the sun came over the horizon, turning the entire ocean into a glittering, golden sheet, and my father lifted me up onto his shoulders. My mother was next to him and she took his hand and together the three of us stared at the transcendent beauty, and I was filled in that moment with such a feeling of love and togetherness that I couldn’t h
ave imagined a more perfect world.
“I have to go back to the base,” I said to Annie the next morning. “I have to try to convince the Prime Minister to fund Geneus so we can continue on with our germline trials.”
“Okay,” she said.
I put a call through to Bruno.
“If I can convince the government and Geneus to support a continuation of our original project, do you think Gendigm would consider investing even if they don’t get a controlling share?” I said to him.
“What are you planning?” Bruno said.
“We now have everything we need to complete the germline modifications. I might be able to convince the Prime Minister to allow us to continue with the project and maybe even get funding from the government.”
“How?”
“They trust me now. They think I’m one of them. I’ll tell them that germline modifications are the only way we can guarantee survival of our population. The somatic modifications are just a bandaid — they’re never going to be able to protect people from the broad spectrum of modified viruses we’re going to be facing. We need to get to the core of the immune system and that can only be done from birth. If they want their precious population to survive long term, which I presume they do, that’s what they’re going to have to focus on.”
“Do you think they’ll go for it?” Bruno said.
“I don’t know. They might.”
“Can you convince them to accept the cooperative side effects?”
“Who said I’m going to mention them?”
“Okay. I’ll put it to the board.”
When I got back to the military base I was informed that the official story about the attack on the de-reg zone was that it had been carried out by the Indonesians. Our own planes had dropped the napalm, as by then everybody was dead anyway and we had to get rid of the bodies, but that was apparently as far as our government’s involvement had gone.
The Indonesian government presumably knew that it was us who had released the virus, just like we did in Darwin, and realized that if they weren’t careful we’d release something very similar in their country. It was the perfect story, and as General Savage put it to me, drunk and slobbering one night, “That’ll keep the bastards at bay for a while!”
The morning after this Savage called me into his office.
“Sit down, Michael.”
“How can I help you?”
“I’ve been sent a memo, and it says that just before the napalm drop on the de-reg zone you and your wife were caught leaving there.”
“That’s right.”
“Would you care to explain that?”
“We were saying goodbye to friends.” I looked at him without turning away.
The General stared at me for a few moments and then nodded and lit a cigar.
“Would you like one?” He held the box out to me.
“No thanks. I don’t smoke. There’s something we need to discuss, though.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s only a matter of time before Indonesia or some other country comes up with a virus just as nasty as the one that was deployed in this country.”
“What are you saying?”
“I would like you to organize a meeting with the PM for me.”
“What for?”
“I think we need a broader protection for our population. We need to convince the PM to provide us with the resources to come up with not only a somatic but a germline modification that will ensure the safety of our newborn children, that will make them stronger and fitter and more resistant to future attacks.”
The General looked at me for a while, then stubbed out his cigar.
“I’ll see what I can organize.”
How could he be so calm? Did he really believe that they’d done the right thing? It was like staring into the face of a serial killer and getting absolutely no reaction.
As I left the office, I took deep breaths and walked down the corridor as fast as I could. I started shaking and went into my own office and shut the door behind me. I could only imagine what would have happened if the General had decided to investigate my trip to the de-reg zone further. Maybe I had become so useful to them they were prepared to ignore this one little indiscretion. Everyone had died after all. Wasn’t that what they wanted?
“Mr Khan, nice to see you again.” The Prime Minister came over and shook my hand in v-space, and I put my avatar on autopilot, shaking her hand confidently.
“Thank you for seeing me,” I said.
“Please, sit.” She motioned to a chair and sat down opposite me. “The General explained a little bit of your idea to me, but I would like to hear more about it from you.”
“As you know, Geneus’s main project, before we started this job with the military, was to develop both a germline and a somatic gene modification that would greatly improve our overall immune system. I would like to propose that we are allowed to continue with that research and that the government helps us to fund it.”
“I don’t know if we’ve got the resources, Michael.”
“Just think about the consequences if we’re attacked with a biological weapon. Look, I don’t want to frighten you, but the viruses we’ve been working on are only the beginning. A can of worms has been opened and there are some pretty nasty worms in there. We can’t just react to each one, trying to find a somatic modification that will protect against it. What we need is a broad spectrum modification that will protect ourselves and our children far into the future.”
“Won’t our enemies be able to find a way around that?”
“I don’t think so. We can enhance the ability of the body to respond to new viruses by improving the innate immune response. We can also make the response more vigorous so that it is more easily able to tackle new viruses.”
“That sounds incredibly impressive, but it’s a very long term strategy.”
“Wouldn’t you like your grand children and your great-grand children to be able to survive, whatever happens to this world?”
“Of course I would. Everybody would.”
“What if Geneus invested half the funds?”
“It was my understanding that Geneus was running low on cash reserves of its own.”
“I think we might be able to get some more investment on board. Especially if we have the government behind us on this.”
“Let me run it by the health department and see where we’re at with the budget. If there’s a chance we can move forward with this I’ll be in touch.”
We both stood up and shook hands as if we were really there.
“Thank you for an interesting proposal, Mr Khan. I’ll have my staff be in touch with you.”
“Just one question,” I said to Susan before logging out.
“Yes?” she replied.
“Why keep up the pretence of democracy? Surely you could keep people under control without it?”
“This keeps them happy as well,” Susan said, with a completely deadpan look.
If we hadn’t been in v-space, I might have tried right then and there to strangle her. I needed to keep my cool, though. I needed their resources. For the problem wouldn’t end here. Susan Green was not the first leader to order millions killed, and she would not be the last.
Then I realized it probably wasn’t her anyway. She was just a puppet for whoever was really calling the shots. Some military dictator. Some weapons manufacturer. Some group of incredibly rich and powerful people who didn’t really give a fuck about anybody. Then again — who knew? Maybe it really was the only way to continue feeding people.
Three days later, I got a message from the Prime Minister’s office saying Susan wanted another meeting with me along with a number of other members of her cabinet and staff.
The following morning, I ran through the whole proposal again for everybody’s benefit. There were a lot of questions and a number of objections, but by the end of the meeting they had agreed that if Geneus was willing to fund half of the project
, the government might be able to fund the rest.
That afternoon, I had a v-space meeting with the directors back at Geneus. Anthony in particular was not looking very happy. I’d managed to turn around what had been his triumph and use it to get my germline modification project back on track.
“I don’t think we should be investing any more money in this,” Anthony said. “I thought we’d finished with this project once and for all.”
“With the government helping to fund it, and HGM industries putting in some money as well, the amount of money needed to get it finished is far lower than it was,” I said.
I’d spoken to Bruno before the meeting and gotten the go ahead from Gendigm, on the proviso I would help them take over Geneus given the right opportunity.
“I like it,” John said. “Government funding is always fickle. If there’s a change of leadership, we could just as easily lose our military contract. This will give us some long term stability, providing we can get it to work.”
“We can,” I said. “We’ve already been successful using the bio-vectors, and if we integrate that technology then I don’t think it’ll be long before we have a viable human baby with an extremely resilient immune system.”
“I like it,” Klaus said. “We’ve spent so long on this project, I admire your tenacity, Michael. And it seems like all the pieces have fallen into place. How much money’s required?”
“Without doing the exact figures, I’d imagine somewhere in the ballpark of a eight hundred million, a third of which will come from the government and a third from HGM.”
“How are we looking, Zhao?” Klaus turned to him.
“It’s pretty much all we’ve got,” Zhao said.
“Tell me honestly, Michael, how sure about this are you?” Klaus said.
“About ninety-five percent,” I said.
Klaus sat there thinking for a little while.
Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) Page 17