Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) (14 page)

“It all depends on the mechanism.” I turned to Kate. “What kind of antigens does it produce? How does it escape the antibodies at the moment.”

“Similar to the Ebola virus — it’s the speed at which it works. But there are also a few notable differences,” Kate said, and ran me through a fairly lengthy explanation.
 

When she’d finished I turned to the Prime Minister. “In answer to your question, Susan, we’re really not going to know until we try. And we can’t try until we’ve developed a reliable method of somatically modifying the immune system.”

“Okay, let’s get to work then.”

After a tour of the labs we went back to the meeting room above, and two men in suits came in. Klaus and Anthony started some preliminary negotiations.
 

“Are we going to be able to continue working from our current labs?” I asked. “I doubt anybody will be that happy about moving out here to the middle of nowhere.”

“You’d be surprised how comfortable our facilities here are,” General Savage replied. “I don’t know, Bill, what do you think?” He turned to one of the men in suits.

“It seems some of the initial work could be performed in the current Geneus facilities; the work involving bringing the modifications to fruition. Once that’s been done, the actual viral testing itself will have to be done here on-site. Of course, security in your lab is going to need to be completely overhauled. No doubt you have reasonable security already, but this is the military, gentlemen.”

“Of course,” Klaus agreed. “Whatever’s necessary.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

THAT NIGHT, I returned home to Annie.
 

“How’d it go?” she said.

I shook my head and told her about the virus I’d witnessed, and how the military claimed the Indonesians were planning on using it.

“Do you think it’s true?” Annie said.

“I have no idea. If governments are going to resort to bio-warfare then that’s the end of all of us. Even if we come up with a somatic modification for this virus there are always going to be more.”
 

“At least the rest of the eco-system might have a chance to recover.” Annie smiled cynically and took hold of my hand.
 

“You’re right. It might not be the worst thing in the world.”
 

“Maybe we should just go away.”

We’d talked about this possibility before. I’d done some research over the past few months and it seemed there were a number of companies who specialized in anonymous transfers to completely self-sufficient floating sovereignties like the cruise ship we’d just spent some time on. For the right price, you could disappear forever.
 

I tried to imagine the type of people you’d meet in a place like that: a combination of CEOs and entrepreneurs fleeing taxation and criminals fleeing the authorities. What would it be like to drink vodka with some tattooed Russian mafioso for the rest of my life? Probably alright, if the facilities were anything like the ones on that cruise ship. And with Annie by my side, at least for a few more years, it might not be the worst way to end things.
 

“If we go away then there’s no chance we’ll ever find a cure for your disease,” I said.

“I don’t know if you’re going to find one now, anyway. At least we’d get to spend some time together. If you take this contract I’m never going to see you.”
 

She was right. The contract would require me to spend months if not years at the military lab.
 

“Come with me,” I said.
 

“What about my work here?”
 

“You could give up your work. You should be taking it easy anyway.”
 

“I don’t want to give up my work. If I’m going to stay here, and I’m going to die, I want to make sure my life means something to someone other than myself.”

“Maybe I could find some work for you with the military.”
 

“Maybe,” she said, but I could see she didn’t want to. And to be honest, even if she was there, I’d still hardly see her. This project was going to require the undivided attention of all my waking hours.

“Let’s think about it, then. We’ve still got time.”

The next day, Annie came home from her clinic very distressed.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“Sam’s sick. Rabies. And we don’t have any vaccines. I don’t know what to do. Although it’s probably too late to do anything now anyway.”
 

Sam was the son of a man called William, who had once lived in the de-reg zone and saved Annie’s life, but lost his own in doing so. Annie had been leaving the clinic just behind William, who was there with his elderly mother. A car had pulled up out the front and two men with machine guns had gotten out. There was another man, ahead of Annie, who had just been sewn up for gunshot wounds, and the men in the car had obviously wanted to finish him off. William had turned around and pushed both his mother and Annie back inside the clinic. Four machine gun pellets had caught him in the back, though, and he’d died within minutes.
 

“I can synthesize the antibodies in the lab if you like, and see if we can help him,” I said.

“Anything,” Annie said. “I owe my life to these people.”

At William’s funeral we’d met Gilda, his widow, and had been supporting her and Sam financially ever since, but I knew Annie still felt a great debt to them.

The next day, I explained the situation to Klaus and asked him if I could use the labs. Klaus was so happy about the military contract that he said yes right away.
 

That evening, Annie and I sat side by side in our car as it transported us to the de-reg zone.
 

I had only been to the clinic there once before and had forgotten how depressing it was. There was almost no money for a clinic like this except for occasional donations from aid organizations, and when we arrived the small, crowded waiting room was full of patients who really should have been in a proper hospital.
 

The boy, Sam, was led into Annie’s tiny consultation room by his mother, Gilda, who looked desperate. She helped him up onto the bed, and Annie explained to her what we were going to do.

“What will happen if it doesn’t work?” Gilda begged. “Will he die?”

“Yes, he probably will,” Annie said.

Gilda put her hands up to her mouth. “What are the chances of it working?”

“We really don’t know. It’s been a while since he was bitten. Maybe if we’d gotten to him earlier, but now it’s hard to tell.”
 

“It’s the best chance he’s got, though, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”
 

“Okay then, please, go ahead.” Gilda put her hands together and closed her eyes, and I could hear her praying.

That’s not going to save him, I wanted to tell her, but I realized the person being saved by her prayer was not her son but herself: giving her the strength and courage to continue.
 

Annie quickly injected Sam with the antibodies. He needed to be kept in a bed and monitored, but there were no such facilities at the clinic.
 

“What if we stay with him?” I whispered to Annie as Gilda continued to pray. “We could go to their house and do what we can for him there.”

It was almost impossible for non-reg citizens, as they were known, to get inside the regulated zone, but there was nothing stopping us from staying outside.
 

Annie looked at me and took my hand. “Are you sure?”
 

“Yes.”

“Don’t get too close,” she warned. “It’s a lot worse out there than you can imagine.”
 

We sent Gilda home and told her that we would come and visit her that night.
 

“It’ll be dangerous. I’ll have to get permission,” Gilda told us.

“Okay,” Annie replied. “Call me here at the clinic.”

Gilda hugged us both and then, despite her small size, picked her son up and carried him out the door.
 

That evening, we drove slowly through a street dotted with potholes. On either side of the road concrete shacks had been built between shipping containers and tin tents.
 

“What do people here eat?” I asked.

“Chickens and eggs, mainly,” Annie said. We had passed more than one free-roaming hen on the way in, although I presumed most people had theirs well-protected. “Micronutrient and vitamin supplements sometimes, when aid organizations hand them out. And any animals they can get their hands on, which are usually dogs and rats, I think.”

“Let’s not stay for dinner, then.”
 

Annie turned to me and smiled.
 

Our car passed a feral looking gang of teenagers, all with torn clothes and matted hair. They looked in at us like we were aliens, and I imagined they didn’t see too many “normal” people out here any more. Some of the younger children probably wouldn’t even remember what the world used to be like.
 

A kind of local law and order had been established in these shanty towns, and locals tended to look out for one another. They were mainly run by local cartels, though, and before we’d come in here calls had been made by Gilda to the leaders of her local “council” to get permission. Most of the cartels liked what the clinic was doing, as Annie and her team had sewn them up on enough occasions, so we had been allowed to pass.
 

Eventually our vehicle pulled up outside a shipping container, and Annie told me this was it. We went inside and found Gilda stroking Sam’s head as he lay in the corner on a mattress. The stench inside was awful — of unwashed bodies — but I soon got used to it. Gilda’s mother was out the back, which we got to via a hole covered with a blanket. She was stirring some stew over a forty gallon drum. I wondered how they got enough fuel for cooking. A couple of the neighbors were sitting around on the wreckage of old camping chairs and upturned tires, waiting for the meal. If they all cooked together, it was presumably easier.
 

I needed to use the toilet and wished I’d gone before we left the clinic. Gilda told me where it was and sent one of the neighbor’s boys to accompany me.
 

“Jut down ‘ere,” he said, speaking with a twang so strong that I had trouble understanding him.

He led me to a series of small sheds that had large plastic wheely bins underneath them to collect the waste. I was surprised to find it so well organized. Although it stunk, at least it was hygienic.

After I’d finished I asked the boy where the contents of the bins went when they were full.
 

“Down the creek,” he told me, pointing.
 

Back at the house, Annie was checking Sam’s temperature. It seemed to have gone down, and she patted his head with a clean cloth she’d brought that she was dipping in a bucket of water.
 

“How is he?” I asked.
 

“He seems okay so far.”

That night, someone produced a guitar and someone else a bottle of home-brewed spirits and they all sung songs around the fire. I leant back in my dilapidated camp chair and stared up at the stars, brighter than they ever were in the city. Despite their poverty, there seemed to be a bond between these people that I rarely experienced in the regulated zone.
 

When we went to sleep in our car, after checking one last time on Sam and receiving hugs from both Gilda and her mother and pats on the back from some of the other neighbors, I felt a deep solace.
 

The next morning, we took Sam in to the clinic and ran his blood tests. His viral load had dropped. Gilda was overjoyed despite Annie’s warnings that it was still too early to predict the outcome.
 

That night, we drove home exhausted.
 

“I guess we probably shouldn’t run away, should we?” Annie said to me as we neared our house, reaching across and taking my hand.

I turned to look at her silhouette in the dark car, lit up by street lights. Her eyes and skin glistened.
 

“No. Probably not,” I said.
 

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

THREE MONTHS LATER, Masanori, Justin, Yolanda, Richard, and a number of other members of our team and I were all transported to the military base. Annie had decided to stay home and continue her work at the clinic, but I hoped she would follow me soon.
 

The afternoon we arrived, Kate and her assistant, Silvia, took us all on another tour of their laboratories. There were five floors altogether, over two-thousand square meters in total, filled with every piece of equipment available and the staff to operate it.
 

“And in here is where we will be conducting the research using the new equipment.” Kate opened the door to a large section of the lab. Over the last three months they’d built a machine, based mostly on our plans, that created viruses capable of inserting genes precisely at any given location.
 

“Would you like me to show them the software?” said Shung, one of the technicians: a short, cute Asian woman with a fringe that kept falling in her eyes that she kept brushing away again.
 

Justin, who was standing next to me, pushed to the front. He was eager to see his creation made reality. He still believed that, as soon as we had done what the military wanted us to do, we were going to be able to use the technology to apply to our immune system modifications. I still hadn’t had the courage to tell him that probably wasn’t going to happen. The military had insisted our process was not to be used in any other application. Klaus had told me to keep the information to myself, but I felt Justin deserved a warning. I just hadn’t found a way to tell him yet.
 

“Sure,” Kate said. “Just a brief demonstration.”
 

Shung activated a screen on our public overlays. With a few movements of her hands in the air she brought up a sequence of nucleotides. “This sequence comes from chromosome twelve. Av457 to be precise, responsible for hair color. Now, if we open up this folder over here, we can see that we have the strings for any hair color we choose.” She brought up an array of 3D heads with different colored hair. “All we have to do is select the string we want replaced, like so, delete it, which will be done using restriction sites coded into the bio-vectors, select the exact insertion points, like this, and then drag and drop the new string into place.” She dragged one of the files across and dropped it onto the double-helix icon, which incorporated the change. “And on voice command, the robotics make what you’ve just designed.”