by Tim Curran
Mitch led them out of there.
Yes, they were still frightened and disturbed, but it was more than that now. Those emotions had been displaced by anger and slow simmering rage. They went back out the pathology door and chose another. This led to another steel door which announced:
EXTREME DANGERCONTAINMENT AREA.
“Well, let’s see what those sweethearts were up to in here,” Mitch said.
Harry used the card and the door popped open. They passed through a series of doors, each warning them off and they found themselves in a wide corridor. To one side there were glass doors running from floor to ceiling. A very dark, smoky glass you could not see through. They put the lanterns right up to them, but the light would not penetrate very far. But there were things in there, forms, figures, something that they just could not see and that was probably a good thing. They turned to the other wall which was set with black iron doors with observation windows set into them.
“Look like solitary confinement cells,” Harry said.
“They are,” Mitch said. “This is…this some kind of fucking zoo.”
Holding the lanterns up to one of the observation windows, they saw a naked man in there. A dead man with that same pulpy, corpse-white flesh that the dead of Witcham possessed. Like them, he was wormy and rotting, bloated-up. He seemed not to notice them, was too busy chewing the meat off his own forearm. In the next cell they weren’t sure what they were looking at…something like a mass of gray-white slime that was trying to pretend it was a man, ropes of it webbing it to the walls and ceiling. It was the same in nearly all the cells…inhuman things, unformed things, unfinished things, things that maybe had started as carrion and kept growing, maybe not entire bodies, but parts thereof that were growing and multiplying like tissue in Petri dishes, an organic miasma of limbs and heads and staring eyes. They saw something like a jellyfish with a hundred coiling limbs, except the upper half of it was clearly a woman with a face that was fetal and indistinct. In another cell, it looked like there were two women sitting side by side, only they were not separate, but grown together like Siamese twins, rows of pendulous teats growing from chest to crotch. They found a cell with three or four corpse-like things in there, white and blubbery and slimy, that seemed to be dividing from a single mass.
These were the things they saw.
Nameless experiments gone terribly wrong.
Most cells had nothing even recognizably human in them…just scraps and cast-offs that were assimilating one another, mutating into things you could not even guess at. Evolution had started in the grave in this place and where it would lead, you just didn’t want to know.
“Enough,” Mitch finally said.
They got out of there, found another door in that maze of rooms that said MOLECULAR GENETICS/BIOENGINEERING above it. They all tensed at what that might be about. But they knew it was going to be bad, that if there was a nursery where these horrors were born, it would be in here.
They stepped through the door and found that there were a few lights on. Even so, the place was huge and shadowy. The ceiling had to be twenty feet high and the room itself was as big as the display floor of a car dealership, hundreds of feet square. Everywhere, there was machinery and tables crowded with laboratory equipment and microscopes and glass jars of specimens. But not only that but urns of human remains, casks of dried insects, stuffed animals, mummified limbs. The dusty remains of what looked to be very ancient cadavers crumbling on slabs. Huge glass vessels held pale limbs and eyes and internal organs floating in cloudy baths of serum…and many of them were moving, alive even though they couldn’t possibly be. There were entire corpses in huge glass tubes filled with fluids that reacted when Mitch and the others got near them, scratching at their prisons, their mouths opening and closing like they were trying to speak. Harry found the living head of a woman in a cask of pink liquid and Tommy found a vat of gray tissue that was undulating.
“What the fuck is this place?” Mitch finally said, stumbling madly down aisles of living specimens and chemical glassware.
There was no way he could know, no way any of them could know. Not really. They could not know nor guess that what they were seeing was an unthinkable combination of a witch’s workshop and a molecular bio lab, an alchemist’s laboratory and cellular biology research station. It was all these things. The intersection of cutting edge medical science and Medieval sorcery. This was a dissection room and a tissue lab, a cell physiology laboratory and a cabbalist’s shed. The meeting of the very old and the very new.
Here were dried snakes hanging from overhead and sectioned rats, presses and Athenors, cauldrons of decomposing animal matter and alchemist’s Pelicans with spidery tubes used for spirit production. Chemical furnaces and ovens, flasks and crucibles, alembics and retorts. All the workings of a Medieval alchemy labthree-legged cauldrons and distillation apparatuses, bowls and clay jars, Liebig Condensers and receiver flasks, exotic glassware such as ampullas, crane’s bills, cucurbitas. Cementation boxes and fermentation chambers, scorifiers and aludels, bone-ash cupels and digestion vessels. Just a crowded esoteric menagerie of long-stemmed flasks and coiling spouts, ceramic pots and copper bowls, dried animals and bones and crematory ash and great charts of indecipherable figures. All of this crowded amongst tables of modern laboratory equipment, electron microscopes and centrifuges, dissection tables and chromatographs. Jars of petrified spiders were sandwiched in-between laptops and protein purification work stations. Embalmed human hands were flanked by pH meters, thermo baths, PCR machines, incubators and digital microscopes. Medieval sublimation alembics were attached to retorts and specimen jars, while to all sides were bones and feathers and staring human skulls. In the same room you could call up the spirits of the dead, you could do tissue culturing, DNA extraction, gene transfers, and protein purification.
“This is a goddamn madhouse,” Tommy said, bumping into a set of capillary DNA sequencers as he tried to avoid tripping over the snaking maze of a 13th century distillation apparatus with condensers and tubing, flasks and cast iron pots, digesters for putrefaction studies. “A fucking madhouse.”
“You’re right,” a voice said out of the shadows. “That’s exactly what this is.”
Guns went up and a tall, thin man with silvery hair stepped out. He wasn’t the mad scientist they were expecting with a dirty lab coat and frizzy gray hair, but a neat and trim man in an expensive suit who looked more like a stockbroker than anything else.
“Now,” he said. “Are you here to seek vengeance for what has happened or do you want answers?”
The way they were feeling, vengeance sounded pretty good. But they weren’t after that and this guy looked positively harmless, sad really. He looked just worn and empty like maybe you could beat him to death with a hammer and he wouldn’t have even attempted to defend himself. He was offering them a look in his dark chest of secrets and they could not refuse.
“It doesn’t matter to me who you are,” he said to them. “I’m going to tell you what happened here. How this came about. Because today or tomorrow the Army will come in here and sterilize this entire place. No one and nothing will be left. The wheels are already turning.”
“And who are you?” Tommy put to him.
“I was, until five years ago, a professor of cellular biology at Stanford. My name is Robert Osborne, if that interests you. I came here five years ago after being contacted by the Army Medical Research Command on authorization of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. They wanted to include me in an ongoing research program known as the ReGenesis Project.”
“And what was that about?” Tommy said. “Making zombies?”
If such a man as Osbourne could smile, could show some human warmth, he did it then. But it passed quickly enough. “Hardly. The aim of the project was an investigation into limb and tissue regeneration.”
Osbourne said that the U.S. military had been interested in this for years, the possible application of biological reg
eneration technology to battlefield injuries. Hence, soldiers with disfiguring injuries and the loss of limbs could be potentially made whole again.
“And how did you go about this…this project?” Mitch asked him.
“By studying Medieval alchemy and certain remains of a Seventeenth-century warlock named Alardus Weerden…”
15
The research, Osbourne explained, was initially begun back in the 1970’s from studies in the acceleration of the healing of battlefield wounds and burns. And from that, it was extrapolated that possibly entire limbs could be regrown. Flatworms, fish, and certain amphibians can regenerate internal organs, tissues, and limbs to a certain extent, but humans can only regrow selective tissues and organs…the liver, the blood, the outermost layer of skin.
“It’s really genetics,” Osbourne went on, “when you come down to it. All the information to regenerate any tissues or limbs is encoded in the genes if we could only activate it.”
He said the initial research was done on salamanders, which can regenerate limbs. The key was to unlock how they did it and apply this to higher vertebrates, namely, man. The theory was that these salamanders, when they experienced significant tissue loss or damage or the amputation of a limb, had a sort of signal response. In that, when the tissues were damaged, cells at the site released signals which activated regeneration on a cellular level. This response was much like that in a human embryo when genetic encoding allows it to grow an arm or a leg for the first time. The trick was to reestablish this marvelous mechanism.
They were all sitting in Osbourne’s office by this time, out of that blasphemous workshop of creation that made everyone a little uneasy.
“Project ReGenesis was aimed at understanding the molecular basis for regeneration,” he told them. “The first breakthrough was learning that when an amphibian regenerates a limb, there was not only healing at the sight to prevent blood loss, but no scarring. Humans always develop scar tissue at the wound sight. Amphibians heal, but they do not scar. You see, at the site of the missing limb, various specialized cells like skin and bone and nerve tissue immediately lose their identity and become generalized. Like stem cells or T-cells, they no longer know what kind of cells they are. This is called de-differentiation. The result is a mass of unspecialized cells called a blastema which proliferates at an amazing rate to form a limb bud. These cells take on specialized roles as the limb develops.”
That was basically the first breakthrough they had.
The stumbling block was that vertebrates were unable to create a blastema. They simply repair a wound and stop. The process goes no farther. In blood and liver tissue, for example, small numbers of unspecialized cells set aside during embryogenesis are activated. These stem cells can proliferate indefinitely, endlessly, but only for general repairs, not out and out replacement. They lack the proper triggers to activate them, to create a blastema. In the marine worm planaria, for example, if you cut one of these creatures into, say, two-hundred pieces, in days you have two-hundred separate worms. How it does this is with regeneration genes. These genes only exist in blastemas. One of these genes encodes an enzyme that degrades the cellular matrix, a mesh of proteins and other molecules that surrounds cells. This enzyme then triggers regeneration by releasing growth factors to the surrounding cells.
Mitch and Tommy and Harry just sat there, smoking, not sure what any of it was really about. Mitch knew a little about stem cells. Only that they could possibly become any sort of tissue they were exposed to…nerve tissue, heart tissue, whatever. In stem cell research, he understood, there was maybe the cure for diabetes, heart problems, brain damage, spinal cord injuries. The blind might see and the lame might walk and vegetables might live productive lives once again. Just as God had intended. Of course, there were a bunch of religious whackos and right-to-life zealots that were against it because fetal tissue had to be harvested. But as far as Mitch was concerned, using aborted tissue was at least a way in making something bad into something good. It was life giving life.
Vertebrate regeneration, Osbourne said, is accomplished by the formation, growth, patterning, and differentiation of a blastema at the limb stump. Mature tissues adjacent to the wound site lose their extracellular matrix and cells reenter the cell cycle in preparation for stump repair and limb regeneration. At the cellular level, the blastema mimics the original embryonic limb bud that gives rise to the mature limb.
“And we were there, gentlemen!” he said, growing heated now. “We were there! Right at the threshold of a new technology that would have saved millions!”
Tommy, with his usual subtlety, said, “So what’s that got to do with zombies?”
“Don’t be such an idiot,” Osbourne told him. “Regeneration is the most complete repair mechanism there is. It could completely revolutionize medicine as we know it. Coupled with nanotechnology, things like invasive surgery, cutting and probing and agony, would be things of the past. Medieval bullshit.”
“Like what you boys were doing out there?”
“I wasn’t doing that. I was against it. I didn’t have any interest in that nonsense, but I was overridden by the powers that be,” Osbourne said. “All of what you saw out there and all of what you see in Witcham is because of a cellular physiologist from the University of Michigan named Brighten that the Army brought into the project. He caused all this…”
Brighten was a genius, Osbourne admitted, but a dark genius.
He was one of those guys that would have made a great Nazi scientist like Mengele. Ethics meant little to him. He was concerned with pure science and anything that stood between him and enlightenment, the ultimate fruition of his studies, was simply a means to end. Osbourne said he wasn’t exactly a people person and had no compunction about using human guinea pigs…had the law allowed such a thing. Now Brighten was not only brilliant, but damned unconventional. One of his hobbies when he wasn’t dissecting things was alchemy, that great forerunner to modern chemistry out of the Middle Ages. Which Osbourne called a “frightening marriage between physical science and sorcery.” One of alchemy’s chief aims, other than turning base metals to gold, was the artificial creation of life, particularly, human life. And this latter endeavor fascinated Brighten, him being a physiologist.
“Brighten was obsessed with not only true scientific advancement, but with these realms of pseudo-science…or what we thought were pseudo-science.” Osbourne rubbed his eyes. They were puffy and red and it had probably been days and days since he’d closed them for any length of time. “He was well-versed in the works of the great alchemistsThoth, Hermes Trismegistus, Jacob Boehme, Nicholas Flammel, the Comte Saint-Germainand had read dozens of Medieval alchemical texts in their original Latin. Things known to be coded and practically indecipherable like The Secret Book of Artephius, A Chymicall Treatise of Arnoldus de Nova Villa, the Coelum Philosophorum of Paracelus, The Ripley Scroll, Bacon’s The Mirror of Alchemy. Good God, he knew them all and could quote openly from them, claimed to have discovered the ancient key which unlocked their codes. He would lecture us on Paracelus and his alkahest, the prime element of organic creation. Talk us to death on Edward Kelly and John Dee, Borellus and his essential salts.
“But what brought him into Project ReGenesis was his discovery of the life and works of Alardus Weerden, a Seventeeth Century warlock or witch or what have you that was executed in 1627 in Wurzburg, Germany, during the notorious witch persecutions of Von Ehrenberg.”
“That’s the guy you mentioned,” Mitch said. “You said something about his remains…you telling me you guys stole his body?”
Osbourne shook his head. “No, just a fragment for study. The Army arranged for it to be snatched from a secret grave it had been interred into by some of Weerden’s disciples shortly after his beheading and burning…”
It was insane, but Brighten, by studying contemporary witchcraft texts of the 17th century, was able to learn where Weerden’s body was buried and to convince the Army brass that the old wizard’
s bones held the secrets of regeneration. For Weerden had claimed that he could regenerate himself endlessly if but a scrap of flesh or knob of bone from his corpse was extant. Brighten was in possession of evidence, Osbourne claimed, that proved conclusively, at least to his superiors, that Alardus Weerden had lived a dozen lives, dying violently or by accident each time, and then biologically regenerating himself.
“So you got his bones?” Tommy said.
“Just one. A single metacarpal from his right hand.”
“And what did you find?”
“We found that there was still cellular activity in it and this nearly four-hundred years after his death,” Osbourne explained. “According to Brighten, Weerden had learned the science of regeneration from ancient texts. Though one contemporary source claimed that he had commerce with demons or entities from other worlds or dimensions. Unfortunately, we were not able to discover the process itself. Weerden had been exposed to something or had exposed himself to something, we believed, although there was always the possibility that it was some freak genetic talent. There was no way to know. But the point here is that Weerden’s remains had activity in them. Molecular activity. At least, that finger bone did.”
“Did you…did you regenerate him from it?” Harry asked, because somebody had to.
Osbourne ignored that. “We studied his cells and from them we were able to isolate FRX-3, the radical gene trigger mechanism of his regeneration. We found that if a bit of bone tissue were placed in a nutrient bath much similar to embryonic fluid, the cellular activity went from a near-dormant state to a frenzied binary division and FRX-3 was released and the tissue began to metabolize. That vat of living tissue you saw out there…that was grown from but a section of Weerden’s digit, a sliver really.”