Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “Where is the waybill?” she asked Hanson.

  He handed her a sheaf of papers. “It won’t tell you anything.”

  Indeed, aside from “Osaka Prefecture” and “Japan” in English, they were written in more kanji. But Susannah skimmed them, looking for familiar signs. Arabic numerals leapt out at her, along with the English letter combinations “KG,” “U,” and “PU.” The casks apparently held a large number of kilograms of the U and PU. She decided she would invoke a translator program and study these pages in detail later.

  “Call the Patriarch,” she told Hanson. “And Uncle Paul.”

  After an hour—one in which Susannah stayed next to the pallet and waited—her great-grandfather and her father’s cousin arrived at the loading dock. They approached slowly, staring at the blocky casks. When Brian Hanson saw the Patriarch’s face, he disappeared to the other end of the warehouse.

  “Is that what I think it is?” John Praxis asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Highly enriched uranium, at twenty percent U-two-three-five. As well as plutonium. Bomb grade stuff.”

  “Oh, no,” Paul groaned.

  She held up the chip. “There’s also this.”

  John stared at the thing. “What is it?”

  “Instructions,” she replied grimly.

  “Let me guess.” He closed his eyes.

  “Chapters on how to make and assemble machines,” Susannah went on, “along with templates for the metal printing and the circuitry. Machines for fabricating uranium and plutonium into triggers. We have enough”—she nodded at the casks—“for about ten of them, by the way. Also machines for distilling deuterium and tritium from sea water. And plans and specifications for missile systems. Standing right here, we have everything we need to conduct thermonuclear war—minus a couple weeks of work and the metal and chemical stocks to see them through.”

  “Where did all this come from?” John asked.

  “Japan. Had to be the government. Nobody else has this stuff.”

  “Do they really want us to start a war?” Paul asked.

  “With the Chinese, no doubt,” John said.

  “What do you want me to do?” Susannah said. “I can destroy the chip, but we can’t send the heavy metal back. Can’t just dump it in the Bay, either.”

  John Praxis glanced at his grandson. “Will you leave us now, Paul?”

  The other man looked uncertain. Then he nodded and walked away.

  “I want Hanson and everyone else in this building gone by end of shift,” John said. “They get good bonuses and generous severance, but they all sign a nondisclosure agreement and are off the site.”

  “What if they’re family?” she asked

  “Then they get sworn to secrecy and a promotion. Next, I want you to bring in your father. You and he will cover these casks, use a tarp, use pine slats, whatever will make this pallet look like a load of machine tools. Give him the chip for safekeeping.”

  “My dad is going to make bombs?”

  “No,” John said. “Jeffrey’s personally going to locate a cave in the Stanislaus Forest—or dig one if there’s nothing available. Then he and two handler ’bots will move this pallet up to the cave and bury it. After that, he wipes their memories, or deactivates them in place. When he comes back, he doesn’t tell you, or me, or Paul where that cave is. The coordinates and the chip are his to keep. He passes them on to a trusted soul only on his deathbed. Can you remember all that?”

  “Yes, Gee—Grandfather.”

  “It’s our secret, hear?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Good girl!”

  Epilogue – 2114:

  That Great Gettin’ Up Morning

  1. The Brain Explodes

  Antigone Wells was showing Angela the intricate steps of the fifth kata, Chinto. Unlike the other fighting forms, which tended to align with the cardinal or compass points, Chinto was fought on a diagonal. Its later sequences rapidly traversed from crane-of-rock stance to tee-stance with front kicks in between. The twisting movements could be hard on the balance, but that was not a problem for someone whose inner ears and their vestibular canals had been regrown within the past twenty years. The transitions from stance to stance could be hard on joints and tendons, but Wells was working on her third lamination of knee and hip cartilage, a general restructuring of her ligaments, and recent courses of bone-density therapy. For an old gal at the accelerated age of 152 years, she was strong and supple and almost as resilient on her niece, who was still young and growing.

  She completed the second block, kick, and step-through combination out of the crane and paused for Angela, who was following her movements. “Got that?” she asked.

  “Yes, Aunt.” The girl held the pose perfectly, head high, body frozen, but met her eyes in the room-length mirror. Around her hips was the green belt that Wells had awarded her for successfully learning the first four katas. Not bad for a fourteen-year-old.

  “Now the next part—” Wells began, starting the transition into—and the room lit up with white light. Her vision blurred, recovered, and she lost balance, falling sideways. She did not have time to get her hands out or turn the fall into a judo roll. Instead, she crashed down on the hardwood floor, leading with her hip and elbow, and collapsed from there to roll onto her back. The shock went through her body as if she had crossed electric wires.

  “Antigone! Are you all right?” Angela was kneeling above her, trying to help but afraid to touch her for fear of jarring any broken bones.

  “No, I’m just—” she started to say. “Oh, Jesus!”

  Her head blazed with pain. A quick check of somatic memory told her she had not struck it in falling. The stings in her arm and leg were already beginning to fade. But the pressure in her head, like an iron band across her temples and forehead, was still building. It felt like her skull was about to explode.

  “Let me get my—” she said, and found she was panting. Wells levered herself into a sitting position, even though her hip sent up a small and distant protest. The room spun with the movement, like the surface of some liquid in a glass she was waving around. When she held herself perfectly still and tried to control her breathing, invoking the meditation techniques that were part of her karate training, the pain took a tiny step back. But it wouldn’t go away entirely.

  When she could think again, she said to Angela, “Would you get me some aspirin, please, from the medicine cabinet?” And as the girl left the room, “Three tablets, please.”

  A few minutes later, with the medicine working through her body and the pain in her head fading into a muted, throbbing bass trombone, Wells rolled onto her good hip—the one opposite her point of impact—got her feet under her, and pushed herself upright. The room didn’t shift and her headache didn’t come back any stronger.

  “What was that, Aunt? Are you all right now?”

  “Real bad headache,” she said. “Just blinding.”

  Antigone Wells had never suffered from migraine at any time in her long life and seldom had a headache she couldn’t account for, such as from tension at work, overuse of alcohol, or eyestrain from too much reading. This pain was different and unexpected. For the moment, however, she put it down to some misfiring circuitry in her sensory apparatus. And certainly, after all this time and all that she had put her body through, she was due for a few unexplained aches and pains.

  The next bout of white-lightning pain came a few days later when she was sitting in her office correcting a legal brief. Suddenly, the words before her on the comm wall dazzled, fragmented, and disappeared. She rocked forward, folded her arms, and collapsed her head onto her desk. It took a minute for her to recover enough to call in Angela from her own room and ask for more aspirin—or better yet, two of the vicodin pills she had been given a year earlier as follow-up to her last lamination procedure.

  After that, the headaches came at closer and closer intervals, each time worse, and she was taking more and stronger painkillers. Finally, Wells
determined that she was not suffering from the expected nerve twinges which were a normal part of the aging process. This was something symptomatic. This was a problem.

  * * *

  Pankajan Rao had seen many of the extended lifers in his ten years of practicing internal medicine. Most of them were healthy, vigorous, and presented as young adults not much older than his own thirty-eight years. But when he began to work with them and studied their medical records, he came to see them as a collection of patches. The surface might be smiling and new, but underneath lay a patchwork: body parts replaced most recently and functioning perfectly; parts replaced more distantly and already beginning to wear; and original parts that were frayed and worn and waiting for replacement. These patients were a time-lapse study in the decay of the human body in action.

  But he had never had a patient as old as Antigone Wells. To study her properly, he needed the full resources of his medical intelligence, Vishnu the Preserver. Only with the mechanic’s vast catalogue of procedures and genetic techniques, showing what had been fashionable in medicine about a hundred years ago, at the very beginning of the X-Life experience, could Rao understand Wells properly.

  On this day, she presented with a short history of headaches. “Blinding headaches,” as she described them, causing her almost to pass out. He accepted her statements about any history of migraine—which had been his first guess—and her understanding of the causes of most transitory headaches.

  Tumor? he asked Vishnu through his cut, while the woman sat in his office.

  She is remarkably free of the genetic markers, the intelligence replied. She does have a history of stroke, which appears to have been fully repaired with early stem cell therapy.

  Could this be a recurrence?

  We must first run tests.

  “Let us take a look,” he told Wells aloud. “I’m ordering a series of CT and MRI scans of your head and neck. They will tell us much.”

  “What about the pain, doctor?”

  “I will give you a new prescription for vicodin—and shame on you for taking old pills. The active ingredients break down, you know. They can do as much harm as good.”

  “What do you think is wrong with me?”

  He could hear the fear of cancer in her voice. He gave his standard reply: “I would avoid speculation until we know more.”

  When the scans were scheduled, Rao was present in the other room, watching the monitor screens along with the human technician who had prepared and placed the patient inside the machine. Normally, if everything had been clear, he would discuss the results with her before she left the hospital. But what he saw here—a surface covered with orange-pink spherules, like salmon roe—caused him to pause and think. He wanted to discuss the images and their implications with Vishnu without the patient’s distracting presence. So he simply made another appointment for three days later.

  “What’s wrong with my head, Doctor Rao?” she asked when she arrived for their consultation.

  He did not answer her directly. “Your records show that you have a genetic condition, autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, and have been treated for it in the past.”

  “Yes, two new kidneys, fifty-odd years ago. Then a new liver, thirty some years later. So, is that what’s gone wrong this time?”

  “Essentially, yes, your headaches are an advancement of the same condition,” he replied. The occurrence that he and Vishnu had examined visually should have been extremely rare—but then, no one had ever seen a PKD patient live for almost a hundred years beyond the normal human span.

  “You see,” he went on, “the designation of this as ‘kidney disease’ can sometimes be misleading, and that is only because it tends to show up first in the kidneys. Actually, the root cause is a mutation in one or the other of two genes. The phrase ‘autosomal dominant’ simply means that you inherited these mutations from both of your parents, so your body has no good copy of the genes on which to rely.”

  “Okay, and what are these genes doing to me?”

  “The first gene,” he went on, “is called PKD1—again, for its prevalence in kidney disease. It sits on chromosome sixteen and codes for the protein known as polycystin one. The other gene, PKD2 on chromosome four, codes for polycystin two.” The disease was so rare, he reflected, that the names for these genes and their proteins had not developed much more than these vague definitions in the past century.

  “The first protein regulates tubular adhesion and differentiation in epithelial cells—those are the tissues that make up your skin and the membranes around your internal organs. The second regulates the ion channels that let your cells secrete various fluids. If you damage these genes and deform their proteins, you can get a gradual buildup of fluid-filled sacs, or cysts, in your organs and their surrounding tissues. You have experienced this before in your kidneys and liver. Now the cysts are appearing in the arachnoid—the membrane that wraps your brain and spinal cord.”

  “So I’ve got bubbles on my brain!” Wells said, apparently trying to remain cheerful. “Like a glass of champagne!”

  “Something like that,” he said, trying to smile.

  “They create pressure, which causes my headaches?”

  “Yes, that is exactly correct.”

  “So what can you do about them?”

  “Ah … nothing,” Dr. Rao said simply.

  “Nonsense! There’s always been something.”

  “Not this time, I’m afraid.” It was a death sentence.

  “Can’t you drain the cysts to relieve the pressure?”

  “We might apply a shunt, if there were only one or two large cysts. But you have too many. And they are growing too fast. We could not keep up, even with repeated cranial surgeries.”

  “You’ve replaced other tissues. So replace this arachnoid thing.”

  “But … this is the membrane that lies between the dura mater and the pia mater. We would have to expose your entire brain, down to the brainstem and the spine. Such technology simply does not exist.”

  “I see.”

  He could understand that, after all these years, all the operations, Wells was trying to absorb the fact that a defect existed for which he could offer no magical fix. Her doctors had always been able to replace any organ or tissue in her body—except the one she used for thinking, feeling … living. And now it was being crowded out of her skull by a few bad genes which she had carried inside her cells since inception in her mother’s womb.

  “So, doctor, what do we do?”

  “We watch. And we wait.”

  “And I get headaches?”

  “Yes, and for that I can prescribe painkillers.”

  “Which will make a zombie out of me.”

  He smiled. “Not for a while yet.”

  “And so, what comes last?”

  “Um … pardon me?”

  “Do the cysts crush my brain? Do they smash out my skull?”

  “Do you really want to know, ma’am?”

  “We’ve come this far …”

  “Your body will fight back by raising the blood pressure into your brain. Sooner or later, one of your arteries will burst. That will be the end.”

  “Like Helen,” she said, eyes distant.

  “Excuse me? Who is that?”

  “No one, anymore.”

  * * *

  For nine months Antigone Wells suffered increasingly frequent headaches, blurred vision, ringing in her ears, and tremor in her hands and legs. She knew that she was becoming progressively more tired, angry, and snappish with Angela. And Angela was becoming more scared and silent. Wells wondered if, some days, the girl was not simply waiting for her aunt to die.

  Work became increasingly difficult, because her attention was distracted much of the time. She tried to maintain a daily schedule, and she continued to field questions from her online practice whenever her condition allowed, but she gradually wound down her case work. She considered closing out her legal business entirely, but she did not know what s
he would do then. Read? Take up knitting? In the odd hours when she had control of her brain and her body, she might as well work at the law, which was one of the things she loved. And, at the back of her mind lurked the notion that, despite what the doctors said, her condition might be temporary and she might one day recover and want to continue her practice.

  Doing her karate became increasingly difficult, too, because her body was debilitated with pain, tremors, and balance issues. But every day that the pain permitted, she still retreated to her personal dojo to perform the stretching exercises which were part of the discipline. Like keeping her website alive, Wells wanted to keep her body as fit as possible. One day she might need it again. Karate was another of the things she loved.

  Of course, she thought about the end of life, the summing up, and what might come next. She had not seriously considered these important matters since her original stroke, almost a century ago. She had now been granted nearly a hundred years of extra life, and in that time what had she accomplished? More living, certainly. More of the day-to-day business that involved every human being on the planet. She had gained the time to learn and master a difficult physical and mental discipline, which was a source of pride. She had grown more skilled and wise in the practice of her chosen career, the law, which was another plus for her. And she had brought three girls into the world and managed to keep two of them alive, which should also count for something.

  On the negative side, she had tried to find love as a normal woman would and had failed at it. At first, her pride had betrayed her, and then the flesh of her face had betrayed her, and finally—she could see it clearly now—her spirit had betrayed her. Whether she had been too purposeful, too strong, too willful—or too weak—was no longer a matter for internal discussion. She had been too something, and it had not made her either happy or contented.