by Neil Clarke
“The hospital’s notification system showed that Ms. Lin Ke’s order for a heart had been canceled, whereas Adam’s monitoring platform showed that everything was fine.”
“Right,” Luo Ming said. “Adam’s system should be much more secure than the hospital’s, yet the cultivation cabin overseer didn’t know the true state of Cabin 35. Why is that?”
“Could it be that Adam’s overseers were trying to conceal the mess inside?” Edmund asked.
“Maybe. But we can’t rule out another possibility: none of those in charge, including the first officer and the cultivation cabin overseers, have any idea what really happened.” Luo Ming put the recording of Lin Ke arguing with the overseer on the display. “Watch the man’s expression—the surprise is genuine.”
“True, as I can confirm with microexpression analysis,” Edmund said.
“Based on the scene we observed, it’s very likely that what happened to Lin Ke wasn’t an isolated incident. But she was the only one who felt strongly enough to make a report to the police, and who went to open the door to Cabin 35. That’s in the contract, but it looks like passengers only exercised their right to examine the cabins during the early years of the ship’s journey.”
“Are you suggesting that all the organs we saw on the ground had their orders canceled?”
Luo Ming’s eyes lit up. “We might as well follow this lead. Edmund, can you break into the databases for both the cultivation cabins and the hospital and pick out all relevant records? It’s possible that there are discrepancies between the two systems—those would be the organs we saw in Cabin 35.”
“You really know how to come up with hard problems for me.” Despite these words, Edmund sounded delighted. “I’ll give it a shot.”
3. Typhon
From his shoulders grew a hundred heads of a snake, a fearful dragon, with dark, flickering tongues, and from under the brows of his eyes in his marvelous heads flashed fire, and fire burned from his heads as he glared. And there were voices in all his dreadful heads which uttered every kind of sound unspeakable; for at one time they made sounds such that the gods understood, but at another, the noise of a bull bellowing aloud in proud ungovernable fury; and at another, the sound of a lion, relentless of heart; and at another, sounds like whelps, wonderful to hear.
—Hesiod, Theogony 820-835 (as translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White)
Nine years later, I find myself in her laboratory again. Edmund has gone from an undergraduate to a doctoral student, but the way he looks at me hasn’t changed in the least—he’s just like any other awe-struck fan. “Mr. Lee, the professor is waiting for you in the animal room.”
“Thank you, Edmund.”
She doesn’t notice when I enter. She’s squatting beside a pig that has to be half a meter tall, all her attention focused on it as she laughs. She puts her cell phone on speaker, and music starts playing. It’s my song, “Fire by Lightning.”
“When I cradle it in my hands,
The sun and moon tumble, stars fall.
Go ahead and fight, destroy;
The king of the gods’ undying wish is in my hands.”
The pig dances to the music on its hind legs, clumsily twisting and rocking. Gradually, it catches up to the tempo. She stands with it and leans against a desk, laughing so hard she can’t breathe. The pig faces her, dancing now with gusto, keeping up even better with the beat. It’s unbelievable—the pig is actually dancing to the brisk pace of the music.
The song, now in an ornamental cadenza, switches tempo. The pig stumbles and tumbles to the ground, startling her. She falls to her knees by its prone body. “Are you okay?”
The pig oinks in reply. Annoyed, she jabs its head with a finger, then says in the gentlest voice I’ve ever heard, “You rascal, don’t scare me like that.”
The pig’s oinks are now laced with a hint of whining. She rubs its back. “Alright, alright; it’s okay, as long as you’re not hurt.”
This is such a bizarre sight. I cough. She and the pig turn their heads simultaneously to look at me together—an image I’ll never forget.
“What’s wrong, Evan?” She stands.
It has Tony’s eyes.
She’s never seen Tony, so she can’t know. But the eyes in that one-and-a-half-year-old pig belong to Tony: light brown irises with a hint of gray. It’s not just the eyes, but also something unnamable in their depths, something that sends chills down my spine, making me forget why I’m here.
It reminds me of how I felt the time I found myself in the middle of a stage, having forgotten everything about the song I was supposed to sing. The electric guitar’s prelude was nothing but white noise, and my legs trembled in the flickering magnesium lights.
“Do you need a cup of coffee?” She peers at me, concerned. “You don’t look so good.”
“Can we . . . talk . . . alone?” Even if I performed at three back-to-back shows, my voice still wouldn’t sound like this.
“I was just about to show you our pig,” she says. “It’s doing really well. Fantastic, don’t you think?”
I catch its gaze again, and in that second, I feel my soul being torn apart.
“My God!”
The pig stares at me as though it already knows its destiny: a wordless acquiescence to suffering, imbued with a fatalistic sense of tragedy. The last few times Tony underwent dialysis, he gazed at me with the exact same expression.
“Okay, Evan.” She steps forward to hold my trembling hands. “Let’s go somewhere else.”
We don’t say a word on the way to her office. The afternoon sun dissipates all shadows in the spacious room. Edmund brings in two tiny, round cups. “Thank you,” she says, but then she doesn’t say a word to me after Edmund leaves. The dappled shadows of tree leaves upon the desk lengthen. I take a sip of the now cold and bitter coffee. Finally, she breaks an afternoon’s worth of silence.
“I thought you might want to take a look at the report.”
A thick file lands before me. I open it, my arms stiff. Inside are notes starting from when the pig was an embryo until now. I can only make sense of the pictures. From the outset, it’s always smiled at the camera, if that joyous and eager expression can be called a “smile”—but within the last month, it’s ceased smiling. On the last page is a close up portrait of its eyes. Staring at them, I can barely tolerate the agitation in my stomach—I throw the file to the ground.
She stands and picks up the file, chuckling. “Good thing I didn’t give you a digital version, or else I’d have to fill out a damaged equipment report now.”
“How could this be?” I murmur.
“Evan, we have to face the facts.” She lets out a soft sigh. “This is perhaps the best outcome: the pig is now in prime condition for organ donation—if you were to ask me, this experiment went unusually smoothly. We found the right path from the very beginning, and we overcame every obstacle within the shortest possible time. I doubt you’d find another instance in the history of science where the road to discovery was so smooth—”
“You—” I interrupt her, but I’m not sure what I should say.
“I’ve already gotten in touch with my friend Dr. Sanger. He’s the best kidney surgeon at the state hospital.” Her tone is level and calm. “I’ve already sent him the pig’s file. He’s reviewed the data and thinks the surgery will be no more risky than a standard human-to-human transplant. Evan, I don’t understand why you’re still not satisfied.”
Only her last sentence betrays her suppressed anger, but it’s enough to provoke all my terror and rage. I unlock my phone: the wallpaper is a picture of Tony staring innocently at me.
“Enough.” I fling open the file and place my phone on top of the close up of the pig’s eyes. “We both know where the problem is, right? Look at these eyes: they’re exactly the same—”
“—as Tony’s,” she finishes. “Of course I know. Those are Tony’s eyes; the cells in that organ are human cells.”
I read the unspoken message from her face. “Are
you . . . are you saying there are human cells in other organs as well?”
“Yes . . . it’s a bit hard to take. Its nervous system is almost entirely made up of human cells.” She shrugs. “Don’t be naïve, Evan. We knew from the start that we couldn’t control the degree of chimerization, but we went ahead anyway.”
“The nervous system?”
“The cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the spinal cord—the vast majority of it,” she says, enunciating each word, as if she’s trying to engrave the words into my heart with her poisoned tongue. “To put it simply: our son is inside that pig.”
I’ve never been so frightened, not even the time I saw Tony being pulled under that car. Back then, I was a father, but now, I’ve become a criminal—what in the world have we done? We’ve melded our son with a pig, and now we’re going to butcher it with our own hands!
My silence allows her to relax her tone. “So long as I stay quiet, no one will know about this. These notes won’t appear in my paper. The nervous system isn’t the focus of this experiment, and it’s not important for whether the experiment is declared a success. The kidneys are perfect, Evan. You don’t have to worry about that at all.”
“I’m not worried about that!” Her forced composure is intolerable. “Killing it is cruel—it’s wrong! Don’t you realize that the pig knows what’s going to happen?”
She smiles. “Evan, what do you plan to do?”
“I—”
“You know, I haven’t been able to sleep for the last two weeks.” Her voice is low. “I keep thinking about whether you’ve been trying get back at me with this pig. I abandoned Tony, so you thought up the cruelest of methods to reawaken my motherly instincts. I kept telling myself that this isn’t Tony, that this isn’t my son; I even refused to name it out of fear that doing so would humanize the animal. But it went beyond my imagination: out of all the researchers, it’s closest to me; out of all the music we play for it, it only likes yours.”
Tony is the same way. From when he was a baby, as soon as he heard “Fire by Lightning,” he’d start dancing.
She continues. “I’ve thought about it: should we stop and let Tony succumb to his fate, thereby allowing the pig to live? But then I saw you, and I realized that we’ve never had any choice but to go forward.”
Her gaze penetrates me to the root, and I, in turn, finally see the trembling that she’s kept hidden inside. Her terror and pain are undoubtedly far sharper than mine: it’s only because she’s been ruminating on them for so long that she can bury them under a tranquil facade. I’ve only glanced at the pig, but she’s been raising it since it was a single cell.
Of course we can’t turn back. Tony continues to deteriorate, and everything her lab has invested into this pig can’t be hidden from her supporters. I demanded that she cross the Rubicon; it’s only reasonable that both of us should bear this heavy cross.
“Right.” I force myself to forget the pig. “Tony hasn’t been doing so well lately. I’ll bring him here as soon as possible. Don’t want to miss the best window for surgery.”
“We have an understanding then.” She smiles, erasing all misgivings from her face. She opens her notebook and gives me Dr. Sanger’s contact information as well as his CV. Then she tells me her own opinions and recommendations for the transplant surgery. Only after it’s gone dark outside does she stop talking. “You should go,” she reminds me. “If you leave now, you can still catch your flight.”
I get up, hesitating for a moment over whether to shake her hand in a sign of friendship and gratitude. But she’s holding her hands together before her chest. I guess there’s no such need.
“I’m off then. Thank you,” I say, my mouth dry.
She laughs and shakes her head. “Evan, Tony is my son too. Why are you saying ‘thank you’?”
“Ah, yes.” I laugh too.
We walk out of the laboratory together. The shadows of the trees pool together, enveloping the world in the stillness of night. I’m about to say goodbye, but then she speaks.
“The first time I saw you was over there, right?” She whispers, “That day, you played such a gentle tune. Who’d have thought that the song you’d end up recording would be so wild?”
I know she’s talking about “Titans.” The inspiration for the first phrase had come to me while I was performing at this school. That night, as though in the throes of a craving for some drug, I rushed around in search of a piano to bring the notes in my mind to life. I climbed through the window of my room and felt my way back to the locked auditorium, never realizing that there was another pair of ears outside listening.
“Detested by our forefathers,
Buried deep, hidden from the sun,
Scythe-wielding, throne-stealing, we bear curses and epithets.
. . .
We’re destined to rebel,
Smashing barriers, heedless of cost;
Let smoke choke the air, let the earth burn to oblivion!”
She sings, only remembering some of the lyrics. She’s also totally off-pitch, but I can’t laugh as freely as I used to.
She turns to look at me. “Now that I think of it, your song was rather prophetic.”
In the end, she never went to the state hospital, nor did she show up at Tony’s recovery party. For five years, she disappeared into her lab, cutting off contact with all her friends.
I’m shocked when she calls me out of the blue. She tells me that she would like me to set up a charitable foundation in Tony’s name to support organ transplants for children. During the last five years, I had emailed her with such an idea, but all my messages had been returned as undeliverable. I immediately agree.
Once the framework of the foundation is in place, I contact her again.
“I get the feeling that you’re about to make a grand gesture,” I say.
“I am,” she replies. “I reprogrammed the chimera gene regulation network and turned it into a blastocyst-like structure—”
“Sorry,” I interrupt her. “You know I don’t understand all that.”
“Give me a minute.” She pauses, as though she were switching her linguistic module from scientific jargon to common. “We already have the capacity to produce human organs in a lab. I used existing chimeras to create a more stable structure; all you have to do is add new human cells, and it will create the corresponding organ.”
“That’s fantastic!”
“I’ll never allow it to look like a human being again.” Her tone is exhausted.
Simultaneously with the creation of the foundation, she publishes a series of papers on chimeras in Cell. Starting with the first human-pig chimera, she traces her groundbreaking work through the regenerative medicine lab. Overnight, she rocks the foundation of humanity’s understanding of “life.”
I buy that issue of Cell. The reviewers lavish her with praise: “This is a revolution for regenerative medicine, hinting at our near future: humanity will be able to swap out our organs as if they were interchangeable parts. We will live longer, maybe even forever.”
Criticism and debates follow soon after. Although a mother’s pressing need to save her son’s life is understandable, experimenting with human stem cells is nonetheless an ethical taboo.
Her third paper pushes back against the torrent of attacks, laying out her model for the organ-cultivation matrix, which she names “Adam.” It resembles a small, square box filled with mucous membranes and doesn’t look like a living creature at all.
“The Adam technology won’t encroach upon any ethical concerns,” she says in an interview. “It won’t develop a human brain; it can’t think; it has no feelings—because we haven’t provided it with any mechanisms for thoughts or feelings. The only thing it can do is use its own rib to save the people who need it.”
C. The Captain
Luo Ming didn’t really think that he could get in front of the captain of Eden based on just a letter—though that was his plan.
The woman before him had ashy white hai
r, wrinkled skin, and a hunched back; even sitting on the sofa seemed to take a lot out of her. Luo Ming was surprised by the captain’s appearance. The women he knew prioritized external beauty, listing organs related to appearance at the front of their replacement queue.
“Regarding the incident in Cabin 35”—belying her appearance, the captain’s voice was energetic—“I’d like to hear your point of view.”
“The first officer has indicated that the incident is beyond my purview,” Luo Ming said carefully, placing his hands before him.
“I actually think it’s better to have a professional involved in the case.” The captain gestured for Luo Ming to take the armchair before her. “But given the sensitive nature of the cultivation cabins, the results of the investigation should be kept confidential. That’s not an issue for you, is it?”
“No.” Luo Ming sat down. “I assume you’ve read my letter carefully?”
“Yes.”
“As I mentioned, I believe this was no accident, but a premeditated crime.”
The captain dropped her gaze. “Your theory is in conflict with the first officer’s report.”
“Haven’t you summoned me here for another perspective?” Luo Ming studied the captain’s expression, then continued. “I went over all the orders that the hospital’s system canceled without explanation from the last three months. The total was over seven times the normal cancellation rate. I traced all the canceled organs to Cabin 35, but the monitoring system showed all the organs to be developing normally.”
“And that’s enough to convince you this wasn’t an accident?” the captain asked. “Maybe the monitoring system is malfunctioning.”
“It’s not just the monitoring system, Your Excellency. Don’t forget the cultivation cabin itself—how did that pile of ‘accidentally harvested’ organs come to be? And we have no explanation for the discrepancy between the cultivation cabins’ monitoring system and the hospital’s order tracking system.”
The captain stared at him. “I’m listening.”
“Before coming to see you today, I wasn’t too sure about my conclusions.” Luo Ming smiled modestly. “I originally suspected that the mismatch between orders was due to the overseers’ efforts to hide the truth. But by summoning me, you’ve told me that even you, the captain of this ship, aren’t sure what exactly happened. That leaves us with only one other possibility: The Adam overseers did not know about the recent incident in Cabin 35. Thus, we can theorize that the monitoring system has been tampered with.”