The Janus Legacy
Page 23
His father’s tissue. The source of all the suffering and hubris. He turned toward the workspace on the other side of the room, set down the vial, and found a book of matches. He pulled a Bunsen burner into position under a metal rack, placed the vial on the rack, and lit the burner.
He watched as the liquid warmed, then began to boil. He let it keep boiling until all the liquid was gone and the tissue began to char. It looked like evil itself as it withered and blackened in the glass. Satisfied he had adequately destroyed it, he shut off the burner and left everything as it was.
Once back in his office, Jeremy shut the door and locked it. He went over to his desk and called home.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Amanda. How’re you doing?”
“Fine.” Her voice took on a suspicious tone. “You never call during the day. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Just calling to say I love you. And to thank you for all you do for me. I don’t say that enough.”
“Oh, I love you, too. I just want to make things easier for you while you wait for the new transplant. Then everything will be better again. I know it will.”
“Yeah, it sure will. Well, that’s all I called to say. I need to get back to some paperwork here.”
“OK. Hurry home. I miss you!”
“Will do.”
Jeremy hung up. Then he grabbed two pieces of paper and a pen.
Glen and Rick,
I appreciate all you’ve done for me, but I no longer wish to be a part of an experiment that should never have happened. I couldn’t keep living like this, and I couldn’t live with being responsible for another human—the next Subject—having to live like this after the eventual transplant.
I’ve destroyed the Subject, as well as the rest of Ivan’s source tissue. This experiment cannot continue.
If you both wish to take over SomaGene after I’m gone, you have my approval. With one caveat—that this line of experimentation cease forever. If you still wish to find a transplant-based cure for Crohn’s, do so in a way that does not involve harvesting organs from captive clones.
He then took the second sheet of paper and began to write:
Dear Amanda,
I’m sorry for having to do this. I love you—I always have and I always will—but I couldn’t go on living this way, and I couldn’t bear knowing that yet another human being would have to live like this so I could live normally again. This experiment has gone too far, and I have taken steps to make sure it never happens again.
I want you to have the house and everything that was mine. Money isn’t everything, but I want you to be comfortable and have a good life going forward.
Jeremy reread both letters, signed them, placed them in envelopes and addressed them. Tears welled in his eyes, but his resolve remained firm. He set the letters on the desk in front of him. They would be easy to notice.
He unlocked his bottom drawer and reached inside. There was the vial of lorazepam and syringe he’d placed there some weeks back, when this idea first came to him. At the time, he’d just tucked them away as a sort of security blanket, in case things ever got too difficult to bear. After a while, he’d nearly forgotten he’d stashed them there. He’d tried to look forward and think of when he would be healthy again. He’d tried to set aside his guilt, as he had before. And it worked, for a while.
Today was just the last straw. Glen didn’t understand the terrible twin pains he faced. On the one hand, his current life was miserable, and it looked like it would remain so for some time yet because they couldn’t accelerate the clone process. On the other hand, he’d now lived like this for two separate periods. He knew how wretched such an existence was, and he knew what he would be inflicting on the third Subject. Worse yet, the Subject could not even be allowed to die, or the whole cycle would begin again.
No, Glen just worried about the clinical aspects as if both he and the Subject were simple lab animals.
No more.
Jeremy drew up a syringeful of the drug. He reached down to the tubing, and then realized that, without gravity pushing the fluids down from the bottle, he would have to assist the drug in moving through the tubing and into his waiting artery.
To shorten the pathway, he moved the clamp closer to where the IV needle entered his artery. Then he slid the syringe’s needle into the rubber tubing. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves and paused for a moment to make sure he’d thought through everything. He decided he’d best push the drug in fast to make sure there were no mistakes.
He placed his thumb on the plunger, and pushed it home in one swift motion.
Jeremy tossed aside the syringe and squeezed the tubing to be sure all the contents were delivered. He felt warm and carefree for a few moments as the drug began to course through him.
No more pain…
Floating…
Darkness.
EPILOGUE
He awoke to what seemed a soft, sweet dream. He felt weightless and free. Gradually he became aware of a faint bubbling sound. It soothed him. He opened his eyes and saw light and shadow performing a slow dance across his field of vision.
He stretched, feeling lazy and warm and comfortable. But something felt wrong. He wasn’t breathing; he didn’t need to breathe. He craned his neck to look around and discovered he only had a limited range of movement. He flailed his paddlelike limbs. What had happened?
He opened his mouth to scream, but he made no sound.
Glen stood with Rick in the sequestered cultivation room. He gazed down at the glass container that held the early-stage Subject in its bath of warm, filtered saline fluid. An artificial umbilical cord provided its nutrition and drew away its metabolic waste products.
“I’m pleased with its development so far. We’ve managed to increase the rate over prior Subjects with that adjustment to the hormone mix.” Glen smiled and glanced at Rick.
“It is amazing seeing this firsthand, from the start. It’ll be especially interesting to see how the gene splicing works out. Are you certain you don’t carry any genes implicated in Crohn’s?”
“Far as I know, I don’t. Anyway, it’s not like we had a lot of choice. It was either you or me to provide the genes to splice into the cells we took from Jeremy.” Glen sighed. “Unfortunate what he did. Another Subject would have been ready for him soon enough.”
“But he did give us the chance to try a gene-splicing approach this time.”
“Yes.” Glen smiled as he glanced down at the Subject, who appeared to be frozen in the throes of a silent scream. “Yes, he did.”
Other books by Lisa von Biela now available or coming soon from Crossroad Press
Ash and Bone
Blockbuster
Broken Chain
Down the Brink
Incidental Findings
Skinshift
The Genesis Code