“Heart rates on both babies are dropping rapidly,” Beatrice said when I ran into Juliette’s room. “We have to deliver these babies, now. Let’s get them down to the operating theatre.”
Juliette was rushed down to the theatre and wheeled in. One of the nurses hauled up Juliette’s robe and slathered her stomach with iodine. Another passed Beatrice a scalpel.
Within minutes they had sliced Juliette open, the hiss of the vacuum sucking up her blood. They removed the dying fetuses and tried to resuscitate them, intubating them and using the paddles, but it was no use, they were too small. Both of them died on the table.
I stayed in the clinic all day but thankfully none of the other fetuses were affected, and by that night almost all the mothers had improved. I couldn’t help thinking that if I had gotten to Juliette a little bit earlier, and if Tania hadn’t interrupted me, then we might have saved her babies as well.
I went back to my room exhausted. Annie was there, lying on the bed, motionless, and for a moment I thought something was wrong.
“Annie?”
She groaned but didn’t open her eyes.
“Are you okay?” I said, going over to her and putting my hand on her.
She looked up at me. “Yes, I’m fine. How did it go?”
“Juliette lost her babies.” I slumped down next to her.
“And the rest?”
“They’re all fine.”
She sat up and wrapped her arms around me.
A few days later, back in Melbourne, I took the elevator to the thirtieth floor of the Geneus building. My hands sweated. Klaus had asked me to come and see him. What was I going to tell him? When they’d done an autopsy on the dead fetuses, Beatrice had discovered the immuno-suppressants in their blood and I’d had to admit it was me. I thought back to the support Klaus had always given me, and how more than anyone he had been like a father figure to me.
I walked down the corridor to the glass door of Klaus’ corner office and tapped lightly.
“Come in,” I heard his voice.
I pushed the door open, and found Klaus with one arm flat on his desk and the other supporting his chin. I stood there with my hands behind my back.
“Sit down,” Klaus said, not offering me his hand.
I sat in the leather and stainless steel visitors chair in front of his large black desk. Behind Klaus was a view across the city. A new residential tower was going up; cranes were hauling concrete into place.
Klaus leant back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He shook his head.
“What the hell were you thinking, Michael?”
“I’m sorry. I just couldn’t let those mothers die. Too many people have died already from projects that this company has been involved in.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t. Enlighten me.” He sat back and put his hands out.
“You really don’t know?”
“About what?” He slapped his hands on the desk in front of him.
“What happened in the de-reg zone?”
“What do you mean? If it hadn’t been for us the Indonesians would have wiped us all out.”
“That was us. We did that. Our own government released that virus.” I stood up. How could he not know that?
Klaus looked taken aback as if he’d just been stung.
“Have you gone out of your mind, Michael? Sabotaging our project, coming up with conspiracy theories. What the fuck is wrong with you?” He stood up as well.
“Klaus, please, you have to believe me. It was all our own military. The Indonesians had nothing to do with it. General Savage admitted it to me himself.”
“They never said anything to me.”
“Of course they wouldn’t. It was classified information.”
“Why didn’t you tell someone? Me? Go to the press?”
“They threatened to have me arrested.”
“I just can’t believe this, Michael. This is outrageous. Why would they even want to do that?”
Just then I remembered the audio I’d recorded at my meeting with Savage. I had it on my com and sent it across to Klaus. “Listen to that.”
As Klaus listened he sat down slowly, dumbfounded, shaking his head. He didn’t say anything for a minute and then he said, “Michael, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“Now do you understand why I couldn’t risk those mothers lives?”
Klaus stared at me and I watched his whole face change.
“Yes. I suppose I can.”
“I had no option. I just couldn’t go through that again.”
“I’m sorry, Michael. I really am. I don’t know what’s happened to me. I don’t know what I’ve become. Trying to protect this company has made me into someone that I never wanted to be. I don’t even know why I do it any more.”
“If we can somatically modify the mothers before pregnancy, I’m sure the next round of trials will work.”
“I don’t think I can afford to keep going. I’ve spoken to Jan over at HGM and they’re not going to invest any more without taking a controlling share in the company.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Maybe I should give it all away. I simply can’t afford to invest any more money in this.” His face was starting to go red. His hands clenched up in a ball in front of him. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to hit me or cry. He slumped down onto his desk, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for him. If it hadn’t been for him and his greed we never would have gotten involved in the project with the military, and I wouldn’t still be living with the guilt and the nightmares of having been responsible for the deaths of millions of people, including people I had loved.
Over the next few months, arrangements were made, as per the original contract, for HGM industries to take over the management of the entire project.
During this time I had a meeting with Gendigm.
“How long do you think it will take?” Bruno said.
“A year at the most,” I said. “We know what the problem is now, and it won’t take long to fix.”
Four months later, thirty-eight healthy babies were born.
Annie and I went into Mabel’s room and found her lying in bed with a tiny baby on either side of her wrapped in a blanket.
“I’ve decided to call them Rhonda and Rose,” Mabel said, a smile of pure pleasure on her face. “After my mother and my grandmother.”
That night, I went across to the serology lab. Everything was dark and quiet and I switched on the lights with a feeling of trepidation. I took a sample of Annie’s blood from one of the fridges that we had tested just a few days earlier. I held it up for a moment, looking at the blood behind the glass and thinking how fragile we really were. And then I took samples of the blood that we’d taken from all of our newborn babies.
Over the next few hours, I isolated natural killer cells from the babies’ blood. I thought about extracting antibodies as well, to see if any of them would have a higher level of affinity for HIV-4 infected cells, but it would take a long time and the chances were unlikely. They had never been exposed to HIV-4.
I purified Annie’s blood sample to remove the infected T-cells and then divided it into twenty samples. Using the lab’s AutoAnalyzer I added the enriched natural killer cells to the virally infected cells and assayed for a natural killer cell response using cytokine production.
In almost every case, the result was the same or less than Annie’s own natural killer cell response. In one case, though, there was a slightly higher level of death amongst the HIV-4 infected cells. It was only small, probably not enough to cure her, but it might just give her the boost she needed to stay alive until the next round of children was born.
I put the cells in culture, knowing that within a few weeks I’d have tens of thousands of them, and I went back to my room and lay down beside the warm body of my wife.
“Where have you been?” she said.
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“Nowhere,” I replied. “Go back to sleep.” I put my arm around her and pulled her in close.
A week after that, my natural killer cell colony was ready, and I injected Annie. Within hours her viral load was down. I monitored her for days, continuing to inject her with the cultured cells. For a while I almost let myself believe that this would cure her — but all I managed to do was to reduce the severity of her illness and hopefully give her a few more years of life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
OVER THE NEXT three years, under the governance of our new company, now run exclusively by Gendigm, we were able to bring to term children that were resistant to everything from the common cold to HIV.
In the last few months I had been extracting a range of antibodies and natural killer cells from the latest childrens’ blood and testing them for their effect on HIV-4. I had found a combination that seemed to not only attack the virus but kill it, even when it mutated, and we were almost ready to start Annie, who was now sicker than ever, on the treatment. The cells that I’d extracted from the modified children in the first round of trials had kept her alive this long, but her illness continued to advance and I knew if we didn’t do something soon she’d be dead within months. If we were successful — not only her but tens of thousands of people around the world would be cured.
In the last few hours, though, Annie had started to develop a fever and we weren’t quite sure what was causing it.
“How’s her temperature?” I said to Beatrice. We had Annie in one of the beds in the clinic.
“It’s thirty-nine,” Beatrice said.
I kissed Annie on the forehead. “I’ll be back straight after my talk. Are you going to be alright?”
Today we were hosting a small conference. Politicians, NGO reps, doctors and medical company executives had flown in from all over the world to hear first-hand about our success.
“I’ll be fine.” Annie smiled up at me out of serene eyes. The news that we might finally have a treatment for her had lifted her spirits in a way I hadn’t seen for years.
I walked over to the cafeteria and made my way through the groups of people milling around, talking, drinking and eating. A number of them approached me and tried to ask questions, but I excused myself and headed for the podium where Rebecca, our PR officer, was setting up a microphone.
“There you are,” she said.
“Sorry I’m late.”
“All ready?”
“I hope so.”
Just then I got a call from Beatrice.
“Excuse me,” I said to Rebecca, holding up a finger.
I answered Beatrice.
“We’ve just gotten the results on Annie. It’s the flu.”
“Any idea what type?”
“No. It’s not one we’ve seen before.”
“You don’t think it’s come from the kids, do you?” There were now over a hundred genetically modified children and a hundred unmodified children living at the compound. Annie loved the kids and spent a lot of her time with them despite her illness. Two of them, Harvey and Shy, whose mother had disappeared one night, were her particular favorites.
“We’re hoping not. We’re running more tests at the moment.”
“Has anyone else got it?”
“Not so far. Not that we know of.”
“Okay. Keep me informed.”
“I will.”
I called Justin. “Annie’s got the flu. One they haven’t seen before. It might be from the kids.”
“I’ll get over there right away,” he replied.
“Cross check it with the most recent flu strains that we’ve been using in our testing. I’ll be over as soon as I’ve finished here.”
“Will do.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Rebecca was saying, “if I could have your attention please. Welcome to EidoGenesis!” There was a round of applause from the audience. I hardly even saw them, my eyes focussed on my message overlay, waiting for a message from Beatrice or Justin. Then I thought it best to turn the overlay off. There was no way I’d be able to give a coherent speech otherwise.
“Today is a momentous day for us all,” Rebecca continued. “After nearly ten years of research, we here at EidoGenesis have finally reached our dream of creating children that are able to withstand diseases that up until now have been deadly to humans. Let me introduce you to Dr Michael Khan, one of the leading forces behind this project.”
There was another round of applause, and I looked out across the sea of people in front of me. I went up and tried to smile. “Welcome,” I said. “This has indeed been a long road. Much longer than we ever anticipated. But then, given the millions of years it took evolution to come up with its fairly average immune system, I think we’ve actually managed to do it fairly quickly.” I was speaking from a speech I’d prepared on my com and people laughed.
I went on to describe all the recorded benefits of our modifications and many of the suspected future benefits that we hadn’t been able to test for, such as protection against cancer.
Then Rebecca got up and spoke again, and after a long round of applause everyone went back to the food and wine.
I jogged quickly back over to the lab. Justin was running the data that Beatrice had sent him, searching for matches between the DNA of the last flu virus we’d used in our testing and the one Annie was now suffering from.
“Just as we suspected,” Justin said.
“Really?”
“Yes. A mutation of one of our flu viruses. The question is, what to do about it?”
“We need to modify our somatic processes, see if we can develop an appropriate response from the immune system.”
“I don’t know if we’ve got time to do that. Maybe we should inject her with the antibodies and natural killer cells you’ve been working on, and see if that works.”
“They’re not quite ready,” I said. “And they’re only really tailored to HIV-4.”
“If we can fix her immune system, it might be strong enough to fight this. Either way, we have to put her in isolation. If this thing spreads who knows what it’ll do.”
I put a call through to Beatrice and told her we were going to need one of the isolation bubbles, then I went back to Annie’s room and told her what had happened and what we were going to have to do.
“Don’t come too close,” Annie said.
I wanted to go over to her and hold her but stopped myself.
Nurses came in with masks on and wheeled Annie out. I followed them down the hall. They put the bed inside the plastic bubble that had just been prepared and sealed it off.
I went over to Annie, slipped my hands inside the thin plastic gloves and took her hand. “My love. You’re going to be alright.”
She opened her eyes under a sweaty forehead and looked out at me through the plastic.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Don’t blame yourself, Michael. Even if I do die, which I don’t plan on doing, being with you has been the most amazing thing in my life. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.” She smiled again, and my heart felt like it was being constricted into a tiny ball and I wanted to wrap my arms around her and protect her. I felt tears coming to my eyes.
“Why are you crying?” she said.
“I love you, you know that, don’t you?”
“Yes. Of course I do.”
My body was exhausted and lethargic, but adrenaline was flowing into me like the saline in Annie’s drip. “I’m going to go and help Beatrice and Justin. We’re going to have to inject you with the antibodies and natural killer cells that we’ve prepared and see if that helps.”
“You need to develop a vaccine first, to protect others.”
“We’ll work on that, too.”
“It’s a pity I haven’t been modified like the children,” she said sleepily. “Imagine how strong they’re going to be.”
“Yes.” I gripped her hand. “But you’re strong, too. And you’re not going to die. Promis
e me that, Annie. You’re not going to die.”
She smiled, almost blissfully. “Okay,” she said.
When I got to the lab, Justin and Richard were examining blood cells under a microscope. On the public overlay was a genetic and molecular representation of the cells.
“It’s in here,” Richard said, pointing to a place on the overlay. “This is the virus. You can see how it’s mutated from the original. These are the genes here.”
“Why is it so much stronger?”
“The immunogenic epitopes have varied dramatically relative to the last several flu strains,” he said, referring to the parts of the virus which elicit immune reactions.
“How is it replicating? Like a normal flu?”
“Yes.”
“Annie’s already been given the somatic modification, though.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s not working?”
“Doesn’t seem to be. At least not well enough. Maybe it’s because of her already compromised immune system.”
I lost myself in the work. It was all I could do to stop my mind from tearing itself to pieces, but I had to focus.
In the afternoon, I went over the hospital again and sat by Annie’s side.
“Tell me a story,” she said.
“What kind of story?”
“I don’t know. Tell me about the future. About what earth is going to be like when finally all of this is over.”
“Well, to start with, there won’t be so many humans on it. Maybe a billion at the most. I mean, do we really need so many people?”
She struggled to laugh.
“There’ll be more room for other species. Maybe we’ll even invent some. Not too smart of course, we don’t want them threatening us. How about an animal with a habit of collecting garbage and piling it up in plastic rubbish bins? It could be their mating ritual — the fuller the garbage bin the better chances of finding a mate.”
She smiled at me and I squeezed her hand.
“And trees and plants of course will be everywhere again. The whole world will be like one big garden.”
Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) Page 20