Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) (15 page)

“Tell me about the workflow,” Justin said.
 

“Very efficient. You can save this operation and then move straight on to the next task. You can switch between genes, between chromosomes, all very easily.”

Justin asked her a few more questions and by the way she kept flicking at her hair even when it wasn’t in front of her eyes, I wondered if we might have a laboratory romance on our hands.
 

We spent the next few weeks analyzing the Rebola virus. Kate and her team had already sequenced the genome and worked out its infection and replication strategies. I checked through every inch of its genetic code to find some trace of its engineer. Like computer programmers, genetic engineers often left signatures of code which marked a design as their own, or left commented sections to serve as place-markers for themselves or future engineers. Many had specific ways of ordering things, and I had seen enough code in my life that I could often recognize which university an engineer came from if not the specific engineer themselves. This one was completely clean, though. Which was no surprise. The engineer, or engineers, had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to keep it that way.
 

Kate and I became friends, but for some reason I didn’t completely trust her. It might have been because I didn’t trust anybody working for the military. The military had an agenda that went far beyond keeping the everyday citizens safe. It was controlled by corporate interests, and whether or not the people working inside believed the bullshit or not didn’t make them any less guilty.
 

A group of us sat down together for dinner one night and Justin, who was sitting next to me, started telling me excitedly about how cool the new software was; a machine he’d affectionately named HAL.
 

“I can take out a single gene at a thousand paces.” He laughed, mimicking shooting with a sniper rifle.
 

“He’s very good,” Shung said, who was sitting next to him. “I’ve never seen someone work so quickly.”
 

“He’s one of our best,” I said.
 

“Almost as good as I am.” Shung pouted at Justin, and they went into a little giggle of cutesie-talk.
 

Once they’d finished, Justin turned back to me. “So, when do you think we’re going to be able to start applying it to our immune system mods? So far all we’ve been doing is focusing on this one virus.”

“I’m really not sure,” I said.

After dinner, I asked him to meet me in the garden foyer of the accommodation wing.
 

“What’s up?” He came over to me later that night. His hair was scruffy, and I wondered if he’d been playing around with Shung. At least it might help him to take the news a little more lightly.
 

“Sit down,” I said.

He sat down, looking at me. His gaunt face and large, watery eyes twisted. I looked around to make sure nobody else was listening. There was a cleaner over by a small fountain, but apart from her the place was empty.
 

“I’m afraid Geneus is not going to let us go on with our somatic immune system trials.”

“W-what? Isn’t that what HAL is for?” When Justin got nervous he stuttered.
 

“No. The military is insisting that we concentrate on producing a resistance to Rebola.”

“But that’s crazy. All we have to do is p-program HAL to make the modifications we’ve already come up with. It’s a-all ready to go. A final macaque trial and we could start on the human trials.”

I shook my head. “They say they don’t have the resources and that’s not what they’re interested in.”

“But, what about Penny?” Penny was Justin’s sister.

“I know. I understand.” I clasped my hand around his arm and held him firmly. “I know exactly how you feel.”
 

“How long have you known this for?” He stared at me, pulling away.

“Just a few weeks. Since just before we left. Klaus told me not to tell anyone.”

“But you know how much this means to me?” Justin put his hands on either side of the chair as if he were about to stand up and walk away.
 

“Which is why I’m telling you now.”

“You should have told me then.” He slumped down and put his face in his hands. I wondered if he was going to cry. He’d been so happy these last few weeks, despite the pending threat of a virus that could potentially wipe the human population out within days.
 

“There’s something else I need to tell you,” I said.
 

“What’s that?” He said without looking up at me.
 

I stared around the large atrium-like room, a soft glow coming from the opaque white roof. Climbers and ferns grew down here even better than they did in a rainforest. The air was slightly humid and had a damp, musty tinge to it. “My wife has HIV-4, too.”

“Annie?” He raised his head.
 

“Yes. She’s had it for years. Apart from our families and some close friends, you’re the only one who knows.”

He started shaking, moving his head from side to side as if he didn’t know what to do any more. “Is that why you’ve been working on this project all along?”

“It’s part of it. Not the only reason.”

“I’m sorry.” Tears welled up in his eyes which he didn’t wipe away.
 

We both sat there for a few minutes, lost in our own private thoughts.
 

“What can we do?” Justin broke the silence.
 

“I don’t know. I had thought of going ahead with the trials anyway, but everything is so regulated here, I don’t know if we’d get away with it.”

“Shung keeps an eye on that machine like a hawk. The logs are checked constantly and not just by her.”

“I don’t know, then. The other thing I’m worried about is exactly what they’ve got us working on.”
 

“You mean apart from Rebola?”

“Yes. Don’t you think it’s strange, working on just one virus.”

“What do you mean?” He finally wiped away his tears and stared at me out of red eyes.
 

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re going to come up with a virus of their own.”
 

“Bio-warfare is completely against the Geneva convention.”

“Do you really think they still care about that? The whole world is going to hell, Justin.”
 

Justin put his face in his hands again and more than thinking about the world going to hell or the evils of bio-warfare I could tell he was thinking about his sister.
 

“She’ll be okay,” I said gently, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“Do you really think so?” He shook his head and looked up at me.
 

“Yes. She will be. We’re going to find a solution to this.”
 

I went back to my room feeling a huge sadness but also relief. I had wanted to tell Justin about Annie’s illness for so long, and finally coming clean with him and having him not hate me was as much as I could ask for.
 

I lay down on my bed and called Annie. She answered and her image appeared in front of me on my visual overlay; she was in her office working.
 

“I finally told Justin,” I told her.
 

“Was he upset?”
 

“Of course. I told him about you as well.”
 

“Did that make him feel better?”
 

“It seemed to. It made me feel better. At least I’ve got someone on my side now. And hiding it from him was awful.”
 

“Do you think he’ll be able to find a way to help you?”
 

“If anyone can it’s him.”
 

“You two designed that thing — surely you can find a way to use it without anyone finding out.”
 

“Even if we could, the modifications we came up with were never tested on humans.”
 

“If someone’s about to die, what does it matter?”

“Yes, you’re right.”
 

“So, test it on me.”
 

“Or on someone else who’s going to die sooner.” Annie still had at least two years left and I didn’t want to risk her health any more than necessary.
 

“If you build in a chemical safety trigger to shut the modifications off, it won’t matter.”
 

“Provided we get to it in time. And the shock isn’t too much for your system.”

“I’m going to die anyway. We might as well try.”

I stared up at the white plaster ceiling, and was suddenly uncomfortably aware of the half a kilometer of rock and soil that was above me. I imagined it collapsing in on me, crushing me. I wanted to get out of there, get up to the surface. I took deep breaths.
 

“I’ll talk to Justin,” I said. “There is a training mode built in to the system — if we can somehow bypass the GUI and code the changes in directly via the command line then nobody need find out about it. We didn’t write the software, though, so I’m not sure how easy that’s going to be. Justin might be able to find a way.”
 

The next night, I waited for Justin in the same place we’d met the night before — the garden. Out of all the rooms in the underground complex this place made me feel the most relaxed. Just the presence of plants, the thriving greenery, the warm but soft light, made my mind stop its mad rush for a second and contemplate my surroundings. Behind me grew tall strands of bamboo, and I admired their smooth slender trunks. In front of me were camelias, in full, blood-red bloom.
 

Justin and I used to play chess together, and while I waited I called up a chess app on my com.
 

“Black or white?” I said to Justin when he arrived, sending him a link to the game.

“White.”

The board spun around slowly in front of me, at thirty percent opacity so I could still see Justin behind it. I shrunk it a little and moved it down. “Your turn then.”

He moved his pawn and I moved mine.
 

“What is it you wanted to tell me?” he said.
 

“I think I might have thought of a way to program some bio-vectors without getting caught.”

“How?”

“Well, you know how the machine has a training mode for students?”

“Yes.”

“The module was built with an instant delete function, as soon as you log out. The code for vector design is unencrypted. If you could find a way to hack in and do the coding by hand, bypassing the GUI, nobody would ever find out about it. Do you think you can do that?”

He looked up at me with a large, cheeky smile on his face and I imagined him as a fifteen year old boy hacking into corporate servers just to mess with them. “I can try. Aren’t there limitations on the training mode, though?”
 

“Yes. There are. There’s usually a limit to the amount of instructions that can be programmed into the vectors, but not if we’re doing it by hand.”

“I’ll look into it,” he promised. “But how are we going to test them once we’ve created them?”

“Annie said she’d do it,” I said and took my next turn.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

OVER THE NEXT few months, we worked hard at adapting our immune system modifications to interrupt the effects of Rebola, and finally we came up with what all our testing promised to be a solution.
 

Up until now we’d been using SCID-hu mice: mice whose entire immune systems had been deleted and replaced with human tissue from aborted fetuses. Their immune responses were as close to human as we could get. By somatically modifying them, we’d given them an immune system that was capable of recognizing and eradicating the Rebola virus within hours, before any serious damage was done.
 

To prevent any complications when we started applying the modifications to humans, we coded in a chemical failsafe inducer which would reverse the changes to any modified cells if necessary.
 

Even still, the night before we were supposed to test our first group of human subjects, I felt worried. Kate had assured me there was no way we would actually have to infect the subjects with the Rebola virus itself, but this was the first time in history that such a large-scale modification to the human genome had been attempted.
 

Memories of everything I’d ever read about the Nazis’ Action T4 and their eugenics programs came back to me, and I wondered if I wasn’t somehow caught up in something similar. I had wanted to use my knowledge and skills to help people, to improve the human race — how had I ended up working for the military?
 

On a number of occasions I’d wanted to leave but had decided that staying was probably the best thing I could do. If Rebola really was going to be unleashed against our citizens then I needed to help. Without protection, we’d be wiped out faster than our aboriginal population had been by smallpox. And in case the military was lying, and they were creating this modification for their own purposes, then being on the inside would be better than being a lonely voice of opposition on the outside.
 

The morning of the first tests I woke up at 5am, sweating. I wondered if I’d contracted a virus, but the labs and staff were so ruthlessly clean it was unlikely.
 

I went down to the lab at seven. Kate and Masanori were already there, along with a number of younger members of the team, and soon after, Justin, Yolanda and Richard all arrived.
 

“Does anyone know yet who we are going to be working with?” Yolanda asked.

“No idea.” Kate shook her head in a way that made me think she didn’t really care.
 

“I just hope there are no adverse effects,” Justin said. “And that if there are then our failsafe inducer works fast enough to stop them.”
 

At 9am, Savage came into the lab and told us we were going to be working with maximum security prisoners who had been convicted of terrorism. Half an hour later, the first of these was led into a small consulting room just off the laboratory by two soldiers. His skin was pale but his eyes and hair were dark, just like mine, and I immediately recognized him as having middle-eastern origins.