Flames engulfed the building. Alex could see the dark smoke filling the sky, creating a black cloud above them. Fortunately for the soldiers, a small rescue vehicle hovered above the structure. There was too much smoke to see its success, and Alex didn’t want to wait around any longer to find out.
Alex ran up the stairs and into the Stratoskimmer. The door shut behind him with an unusual clang. Inside, the décor sharply contrasted with Guri’s Spartan apartment. Wall to wall carpeting, leather couches and chairs, and a wet bar constructed from mahogany wood gave the ship’s interior an air of elegance.
Though Alex could now buy one for himself, an old friend gave the ship to him before his career at Neurono-Tek came to full fruition. It was an extremely expensive way to say thank you, and Alex could do nothing but accept.
“Tom!” Alex shouted. “Get us the hell out of here!”
“You got it!” promptly responded a deep voice emanating from the walls.
The ship instantly took flight. Despite the rapid acceleration, all those on board felt as if they were barely moving. The Stratoskimmer’s gravity dampeners certainly made the ride both a quick and luxurious one.
Exhausted, they all lounged on the couches and chairs. At first no one wanted to speak of what had just happened as the shock of the situation set in.
However, they needed to move forward.
Alex was the first to break the silence. After walking over to the bar, he asked if anyone would care for a drink.
William sprawled himself out on one of the couches. He had taken off his sandals to save the leather furniture. Looking up at Alex, he said, “One cold beer.”
“Can I have a Shirley Temple?” Guri asked, while raising a finger.
“Make that two beers,” William said. “One for me and one for our new friend over here.”
“But… but my irritable bowel,” Guri tried to spit out.
“Drink up,” Alex agreed. “You’re going to need it.”
Alex handed out a drink to everyone. As the beer sounded appetizing, they all partook in its hops-filled flavor.
After finishing their beverages, Alex and William sat on either side of Guri. Feeling a little claustrophobic, he kept his arms close to his side and took quick sips from the beer bottle.
“Guys,” Marissa warned, “Guri is a guest with us now and we must treat him as such. Play nice.”
“Tom,” Alex asked, “could you connect us with Samantha back at Neurono-Tek? I think she also needs to hear what our new guest is dying to tell us.”
Chapter 15
Samantha found herself alone in the gray and uninviting bunker underneath the main research building. It was the type of place that almost made her want to be back on the earth’s surface, no matter what the circumstances.
“They could have at least put one potted plant down here!” Samantha said aloud. No one was there to listen, and her voice echoed throughout the room.
“I bet a man designed this! No paintings, gray walls, and sterile lighting. I’ve seen prisons with more décor than this place!”
Though correct about the room’s decorations, its purpose was never meant to showcase the business or entertain guests. The facility had been placed securely under the main research building to be utilized only in a time of emergency. As The Disease threatened to wipe out mankind and as Neurono-Tek faced another possible terrorist attack, that time had certainly come.
The bunker was spacious, however. It boasted a complete forensics and chemistry lab, storage facility, and living quarters that could accommodate at least ten people. Plus, there was a separate and sterile autopsy area enclosed in glass that currently held the body Marissa brought to them for study.
Samantha went over to a long, clear desk full of multicolored, yet translucent, buttons etched into it. She was familiar with the layout and knew exactly how to activate the system.
She placed her two hands upon a green circle on the desk and kept it there until it turned red. It was a painful process as tiny laser beams pierced her palms, obtaining thousands of microscopic blood samples while also checking her venous fingerprint.
Samantha removed her hands. Her palms appeared slightly red. The laser had cauterized all the capillaries, preventing any further blood loss.
The entire room began to activate, starting with the labs and then moving over to the living quarters and storage facility. Finally, the lights in the autopsy room began to brighten.
The body lay on a table inside. It was obviously a young woman and a well- preserved one at that. Blankets covered her above the chest but her bare neck and head were visible. She appeared more asleep than dead.
Her skin was still red from the later stages of The Disease, but her long red hair looked as if it had just been combed.
Samantha walked over to the glass encasing the autopsy room and looked into it.
“I guess it’s just me and the stiff over here,” she said irreverently. “I’m at least glad it’s another woman.”
Painted along the walls were light gray rectangles about seventy inches wide and fifty inches high. It took a little squinting but an astute eye could differentiate the subtle color difference.
These light gray rectangles were the last to activate in the bunker. Made of phosphorous-based polymers painted onto the wall, they assembled with a simple electrical charge to create an exquisite picture. Separate live feeds of the entire Neurono-Tek facility instantly displayed on them.
Samantha looked at the screens around the bunker. The mass exodus of the complex had almost been completed. Police vans and a few fire trucks replaced all the medical vehicles. Most had been stationed outside the main power building but a few others remained next to the hospital.
“I sure hope these guys are getting paid overtime! Twice in a week. That’s two times too many!”
Though Samantha joked, she felt upset inside. The sight and smell of the dead maintenance workers, the recent terrorist bombing, and whatever now was happening became overwhelming. At this point she wasn’t sure if she should just ignore it all and continue with her work or simply pack up and leave to preserve her sanity. A Broadway play along with a nice Italian restaurant seemed mighty tantalizing right about now.
The decision required little thought. She belonged at Neurono-Tek, and she certainly had no intention of leaving. The company, if not the world, needed her where she was at this moment.
Samantha sat down behind the long desk next to the autopsy room. It faced the body and had the same layout as the one she just activated. Clear with translucent multicolored buttons, it looked comparable but had a completely different function.
“Samantha?” a voice reverberated in the room. Again there was a Samantha but no picture.
Samantha swiveled her chair around towards the control room desk. Just as she turned, a holographic image of Alex and the rest of the group within the Stratoskimmer appeared. She instantly noted them all drinking beer and lounging on the couches.
Before the picture became clear, Alex alarmingly asked, “What happened? Why are you in the bunker? Is there a problem?”
Alex knew the bunker was off limits—even for Samantha. He had quarantined the area until he personally felt it safe for anyone to enter.
Samantha took a deep breath and succinctly told Alex what had happened. Though completely frazzled by what had occurred, she needed to keep calm and show Alex she had things under control.
It definitely explained why it had been so difficult to find her as it took over fifteen minutes just for Tom to make the connection.
Alex had only one response, “Necroids!”
No one knew what Alex insinuated. Even Jonathan seemed confused. The term was nothing he or any of them had ever encountered.
“What’s a necroid?” Samantha asked skeptically.
“This all makes perfect sense now. The assault on Neurono-Tek last week was just a ploy. The real attack came not with the bomb but with the bomber.”
“Are you insinuating i
t was a suicide mission?” Samantha said.
“I’m not insinuating anything. It was a suicide mission. The UAA must have known that the body would be stored at Neurono-Tek. Plus, they must have surmised that with the commotion caused by the attack, we would be spending all of our time cleaning up the mess and trying to bolster our security. The thought of a necrotic corpse would be dead last on our minds.”
“But how come we didn’t notice any of these necroids at the autopsy?” Samantha asked.
“Because we never did a genetic analysis. The autolysis pill degraded all the proteins into simple amino acids. Since DNA has innate instability, it was the first to break down. Because the terrorist’s genetic blueprint had been lost, the forensics team decided to forgo any further detailed DNA studies. So, unless you’re looking for a necroid, you would never think to run a magnetic scan.”
Marissa interjected, “But I must ask. How’d you know so much about these necroids?”
“Theoretical anatomy,” Alex answered. “It’s a little-known scientific specialty where researchers devise certain biological possibilities that could exist on other planets. One of the most debated topics recently has been what they called a necroid.”
Samantha raised an inquisitive eyebrow.
“The interesting thing,” Alex continued, “is that a Saudi Arabian scientist wrote a paper two years ago stating that he actually created a whole species of these self- replicating necroids.”
“Interesting,” Marissa commented.
“The author recanted the paper a month later and was never heard from again. It was like he vanished. There were no interviews and his entire lab had been vacated. It’s been a mystery that has haunted the scientific community since, but I’m certain that this is the necroid species he created.”
Samantha quickly surmised the necroid’s engineering. “So what you are trying to say is that the basic building block for these necroids is not biological but mechanical.”
“Exactly. Instead of DNA they have ME-DNA, standing for mechanically equivalent deoxyribonucleic acid. It’s structurally similar and has the same configuration and electrical charges but is constructed from a silicone-iron backbone. Essentially it’s nondegradable and designed to assemble an entire necroid using only simple amino acids and the enzymatic components at each end of the ME-DNA.”
“So,” Samantha asked, “how do we stop them?”
“I don’t know.”
Samantha rarely heard Alex say that term and now, especially, was the one time when she wished he hadn’t uttered it. “Well,” she said, almost exasperated, “can you at least tell me how your little adventure went on Crete?”
“Let me introduce you to our new friend, Guri Bergmann,” William interrupted. “He was just about to tell us about his involvement with The Disease.”
“Well, I… a… ,” Guri said with a nasal voice, pushing up his glasses. “I was sworn to secrecy. However, I think I may have had something to do with The Disease. But this whole thing was never supposed to happen.”
“You started it?” Marissa said.
“I wouldn’t exactly say that I, personally, started it. But what I would say is that something definitely went wrong with the project on Astipalea.”
“Now there’s an understatement,” Samantha blurted.
“Let’s just hear him out,” Alex interrupted. “What were you involved in? I researched your work, but you’ve not published anything for years.”
“Well, I was not allowed to publish anything. About five years ago, The New Reality hired me as a genetic engineering consultant and our contract stipulated that all my work was their property. Since they decided not to publish anything, I really could do nothing about it.”
Alex wasn’t surprised. The New Reality had branched out into a myriad of endeavors with genetic engineering being its most clandestine. Somehow this enterprise must have inadvertently spawned The Disease pandemic.
“What were you researching?” Marissa quickly asked.
“This may seem difficult to believe but they wanted me to find the greatness gene. You know. The gene that may trigger a cascade of events that makes a particular person stronger, smarter, quicker, or even braver.”
“Well, look no further,” William said with his arms wide open. “Lucky for you my greatness gene also came with stunning good looks.”
Ignoring William, Guri responded, “The main thing about the whole project was that The New Reality provided me with twenty separate DNA samples all believed to contain the greatness gene.”
“Did you ever question whose DNA they were?” Marissa said.
“No,” Guri responded succinctly. “I just took the samples and began my research.”
Marissa knew the answer but had to inquire. Guri did not seem like the type to make waves or ask questions. Both brilliant and naïve, the man was destined to create something so revolutionary that he would be too dim-witted to foresee its consequences.
“What did you do with them?” Samantha eagerly asked.
“I began analyzing the DNA but found nothing unusual. I then compared their DNA to specific types of people: rich, poor, smart, dumb, famous, and even infamous. Again, there was nothing outstanding. In fact, I almost found no difference at all.”
William looked skeptical. Though only about two percent of human DNA actually coded proteins, he understood enough about genetics to ascertain that certain gene variants would be more adventitious than others.
“You obviously found something,” William rebutted sarcastically.
“Well, sure. But that wasn’t until I cultivated the DNA itself.”
Guri went on to explain how he engineered different cell lines from the samples of DNA given to him. Muscle, liver, brain, and kidney tissues were all grown from each of the original twenty cell lines and then compared to those samples cultivated from ordinary people. Anal retentive by nature, he didn’t neglect a single detail.Jonathan commented first, “I guess you then just reverse engineered your results to ascertain the proper gene.”
“You were following that?” Alex asked, surprised.
Jonathan laughed. “The human body is not that much different from a machine. Sure, the parts have different names and the pieces are different, but the end result is the same.” He gave Alex a smile, “No need to overcomplicate the situation.”
Alex agreed.
“Well,” Guri said, “reverse engineering is rather an oversimplification. After an exhaustive search of the proteins, we discovered that the cells deemed great produced a distinct variant of the bcl-xl protein.”
Samantha immediately understood the implications. She then went on to describe how bcl-xl was responsible for determining the energy-producing capacity of all human mitochondria. Because these are the main energy-producing organelles in the cell, more efficient and powerful ones would prove adventitious.
“Exactly,” Guri concurred. “When we went back to find the gene that coded this protein, we found that everyone had the same one on chromosome 16 and that they were all basically the same, regardless from whom they came.”
“You mean we all have the same gene for this protein variant?” Marissa asked.
“Yes,” Guri said while caressing his beard with his hand.
“The gene’s imprinted, isn’t it?” Samantha concluded aloud.
Guri nodded in agreement and then went on to detail the genetic imprinting concept. He explained that humans obviously have one set of genes from each parent. 99% of the time both sets are coded, but in less than 1%, only one or neither are translated into proteins. These are the imprinted genes and harbor a special carbon-based cluster called a methyl group attached that make them unusable.
He went on to clarify that those people considered great did not have the bcl-xl gene imprinted and were able to produce this special protein.
“So I understand why you didn’t find the answer through simple DNA analysis,” Alex commented. “Because we all have the same gene, each of our genetic prof
iles would look the same.”
“And my last step, “Guri explained, “was to create a specific DNA enzyme to activate the bcl-xl protein.”
He looked a little perturbed and uneasy with what he had to say next and paused before he again began to speak.
“I told The New Reality that it would take time and at least a year of further research before I could deem it safe for human trials.”
“Who did you tell?” Alex interrupted. “Who was your contact person? Do you have a name?”
“Dr. Christakos,” Guri blurted, glad to finally say the man’s name. “But he’s dead now! Incinerated immediately in the explosion, along with all of our work!”
Guri’s display of emotion was uncharacteristic and short-lived. Just after this small outburst he settled back into his crouched position and pushed up his glasses as if nothing had occurred.
“Was anyone else privy to your discovery?” Alex asked.
“No one,” Guri replied. “Because of the project’s secrecy, not even Dr. Christakos or his associates knew any specific details. After receiving my bcl-xl activating enzyme, The New Reality immediately shut down my lab, and Dr. Christakos started human experimentation on unsuspecting people entering the hospital at Astipalea.”
Jonathan cringed at Guri’s admission. The lack of scientific method and the blatant disregard for humanity appalled him. Those were his friends who died back there on the island. And for what? Was it to save time or money or was The New Reality too impatient to proceed with proper scientific protocol? These thoughts infuriated the usually stoic man, but he knew lashing out on Guri would be pointless. Though responsible indirectly, he was not the one to blame.
“The bcl-xl protein definitely explains why the mitochondria appeared the way they did in those people who died of The Disease,” Marissa said.
Alex commented, “But it still doesn’t explain why it’s lethal or how it spreads.” He looked over to Samantha. “We’re going to have our work cut out for us. After I drop off my colleagues, I’ll meet you in the bunker before the police place a full quarantine around Neurono-Tek.”
The New Reality Page 10