The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (21 page)

In unison, the men turned from
Travis and raised their pistols. Lasers placed a solitary red dot on my
breastbone.

I took a deep breath. “Just end
it,” I managed. Motes glittered in the beams.

In response, my cochlear
implants burst with static. Breathing replaced it, each breath punctuated with
a short wheeze. “My daughter is quite unhappy with me,” a voice said.

Alexander Chenko.

Whether he waited in the
hallway or a continent away, I’d no idea. His words came through a tightcast
directed at my implants.

He sighed. “She fails to
apprehend that a man in my position cannot afford to leave certain insults
unanswered.” He paused. “Ah well, such is the idealism of youth,
da
?”

“Anna—she’s all right?”

“That you have a tongue with
which to ask provides the answer.” His voice boomed, omni-directional. Godlike,
it filled my head.

“Tell her I’m sorry,” I said.

“And you expect this to provide
sufficient recompense?”

“No. Not really. I just want
her to know.”

Silence fell and my vision
darkened; Chenko was making sure I knew who was in control. In the muffled
darkness, I felt as if I were trapped in a coffin awaiting the thump of burial
dirt. Such was the moment of his judgment.

Then static ate the silence. My
vision returned with a burning flash.

“Consider her intervention as
the sole reason you will not join your associate in collaboration.”

Without a word, Chenko’s men
turned from me. I was free to go.

Filled
with a hollowness that has only deepened with time, I watched Travis’s blood
pressure plummet. My vision blurred with a cascade of Op warnings and my ears
rang with a klaxon, echoes of which awaken me yet, in the deep of night, to
sheets soaked with sweat.

Suddenly, the data ceased; the
alarms snapped silent. Chenko, of all people, was sparing me the final details.

All but one.

In the
quiet, I realized Travis still had time to assess his work. His spatters had
become random; his lines, thin and lifeless; his flow, stagnant. His final
painting amounted to little more than a Jackson Pollock knock-off.

I wanted to say something, to
offer comfort, to ask forgiveness.

Words wouldn’t come.

Turned out, none were needed.

With one last gesture, blood
dripping from his fingertip, Travis signed his canvas.

Organ Nell

Jennifer Pelland

Nell Gabrielli:
They tell me I’ve
saved nearly two hundred people’s lives already, and helped almost five hundred
more. (Pauses.) That’s important. That’s real important.

Richard Forrest,
Medical Ethicist:
Ms. Gabrielli is a prisoner of the medical system, plain and simple. What’s
been done to her is a travesty. And the fact that she was convinced to consent
to it only makes it worse.

Dr. Sylvia Burbage, New
England Medical College:
Nell is a miracle. All our team did was take the genetic bounty that nature
provided her and find a way to make it benefit others. I understand that people
find this disturbing, but how could we let this gift of hers go to waste? Now
that would have been irresponsible.

Father Raymond Cleary,
St. Cecilia’s Church, Lowell:
I’m generally wary of medical professionals declaring things to be miracles.
That’s the church’s job. But in the case of Nell Gabrielli, I find it hard to
argue. And like most miracles, it comes at a high cost for the grantor.

Nell Gabrielli:
When was the last time
I left the hospital? (Looks out window.) Maybe six years?

Dr. Neil Steffensen,
Minneapolis School of Medicine:
Any doctor who accepts a transplant from Nell
Gabrielli is playing Russian roulette with his patient. We have no idea what’s
going to happen to these people down the line.

Mick Coombs, Transplant
Recipient:
I’ve gotten two years of life that I wouldn’t have had without this replacement
kidney. They wouldn’t even put me on the regular transplant list because I was
so old. I don’t care if I start sprouting horns or turn green tomorrow—I would
never have lived to see my first great-grandchild without this kidney.

Megan Ferretti, Medical
Reporter for NBS:
It all began at Lowell Memorial Hospital, a public hospital twenty-five miles
north of Boston. Lowell Memorial serves predominantly low-income patients, many
of whom get free or low-cost insurance coverage from the state. The hospital
was suffering a staffing crisis, and its president started asking his friends
in the local medical community for help. One of the doctors who answered the
call was Dr. Sylvia Burbage, a professor and researcher at New England Medical College,
who started volunteering her services on weekends. One of her first patients
was Nell Gabrielli, an unemployed twenty-six-year-old woman.

Dr. Burbage:
Nell came to me
presenting with a small fleshy sac, growing from the surface of her stomach.
Her chart indicated that she’d been treated all her life for benign, mature
teratomas. Teratomas are tumors that mimic other body tissues, most commonly
teeth or hair, but sometimes more complex organs as well. Now, it was unusual
enough that she produced so many of them, but to make her case even more
unusual, the teratomas didn’t grow inside her body, but on the surface. I
decided to perform a biopsy and an ultrasound before excising it, just to be
safe, and was astounded by the results. Her body had grown a tiny, functioning
kidney. So I asked her to please come back with me to New England Medical for
further tests. My research team was already working on genetic regulation of
organ formation, so it wasn’t hard for us to adjust our focus from growing new
organs in mice to working with Nell.

Nell
Gabrielli:
I just wanted the thing removed. I was so sick of gro
wing those stupid skin
bags all over my body. Especially the ones with teeth in them. If I had to hear
one more guy ask if I had teeth in my hoo-hah... (Trails off.) I guess I was
hoping Dr. Burbage could cure me.

Richard Forrest:
Oh, they could
completely cure Ms. Gabrielli. But they’ve convinced this poor woman that her
life’s purpose is saving other people. I hope she some day realizes that her
own life is just as worth saving.

Dr. Burbage:
We were able to
accelerate the organ’s growth by essentially performing chemotherapy on it,
which seems contradictory, but teratomas don’t behave like a typical tumor. The
results were amazing. Within a month, we had an adult-sized kidney that could
be removed through a simple outpatient procedure. Better yet, with Nell being
blood-type O negative, we had a kidney that could be transplanted into a wide
range of recipients.

Megan Ferretti, NBS:
As news leaked out
about Nell’s abilities, colleagues of Dr. Burbage dubbed her “Organ Nell.”

Random on-the-street
interviewee #1:
I’m glad she exists, but man, would I hate to be her. Her body’s freaky.
Freak-show freaky.

Dr. Burbage:
Of course, we then had
to deal with changing the way Nell’s major histocompatibility antigens were
expressed so we could help minimize the possibility of rejection among
potential recipients. That took some time and experimentation, but Nell was
amazingly good-spirited about it.

Nell Gabrielli:
I hadn’t had the money
to pay the rent in months, so I was about to be evicted. No one wants to hire
someone who’s in the hospital every month or two to get stuff removed. And the
lumps freaked people out. It was nice to have a roof over my head, even if it was
a hospital roof.

Dr. Steffensen:
I can’t even begin to
list all the rules of medical ethics that Dr. Burbage and her team have broken.
You don’t experiment like that on a human being without first spending years
working out computer models, then more years experimenting on mice, then
primates, before moving up to experimenting on actual sick people. Ms.
Gabrielli was a healthy human being with an unfortunate and unusual
predilection toward sprouting benign but disfiguring teratomas before Dr.
Burbage and her team got their hands on her.

Ted Ousterhout, AIDS
Action Committee, Massachusetts:
A person can live decades with HIV nowadays, but
if they suffer organ failure, even if it’s completely unrelated to their HIV
status, that’s it. Lights out. End of show. Our clients’ only options used to
be to accept organs from high-risk donors. Now, we’ve got Nell.

Megan Ferretti, NBS:
The organs and tissues
grown by Nell’s body are only being transplanted into patients who otherwise
wouldn’t be considered for the surgery. This has prompted many people on the
official transplant lists to question why they’re being left to die while those
who have been deemed medically unfit for new organs get new leases on life.
It’s also led others to wonder if Nell’s doctors are preying on the desperate
to further their research.

Dr. Steffensen:
There is no guarantee
that these transplanted organs won’t start sprouting teratomas of their own.
True, none have yet, but we’ve hardly had enough time to observe how these
organs will behave in the long run. Plus, if they do, I’d say there’ll be zero
chance that they’ll be nice, easy-to-remove surface teratomas like Ms.
Gabrielli’s. Now, I ask you, do you think it sounds like a good idea to put a
transplant recipient—especially one who was sick enough that they couldn’t get
on the official transplant list—through additional major surgery?

Richard Forrest:
As you know, it’s
illegal to pay money for an organ, so Ms. Gabrielli isn’t getting any
compensation for what she’s going through. New England Medical provides free
room and board, but that’s it. She doesn’t even earn a salary. That’s just one
of the many tricks they’re pulling to keep the government from shutting them
down. So if Ms. Gabrielli decided to walk out the door tomorrow, she’d be destitute.

Nell Gabrielli:
Oh, the staff here are
really nice. Dr. Burbage buys me things. (Holds up computer gaming system.)
This plays movies and music too. And some of the people I grow organs for buy
me gifts. The people from the AIDS group make sure I always have flowers. They
tried buying me books, but I don’t really read, so they get me movies instead,
which I play on this. (Scratches lump on neck and winces.) Forgot about this
one. I’m not supposed to poke it. It’s an eyeball, so it’s real sensitive. I wish
they wouldn’t grow stuff on my neck. I make them take stuff off of my face
before it can turn into anything, but they won’t take stuff off of my neck.

Dr. Burbage:
Never in our wildest
dreams did we think we’d be able to develop her abilities to safely produce so
many functional organs all at the same time. We really got lucky with that. I
won’t bore you with the medical details, but needless to say, we’re thrilled.
We just wish we could predict what her body was about to grow, or even direct
it, but it doesn’t matter. There’s always at least fifty people waiting who can
use whatever her body chooses to produce.

Dr. Steffensen:
We’re all waiting for
the details on that particular development, but New England Medical isn’t
sharing them. Frankly, many of us in the medical community are skeptical about
this one. Not that Ms. Gabrielli’s body has this ability. There’s no denying
that. What we’re skeptical about is the means they used to encourage her body
to produce organs so fruitfully. If they’re not talking, then that means
they’ve got something to hide.

Random on-the-street
interviewee #2:
I think I’d rather die than put a part of that woman into my body. Aren’t
teratomas tumors? Why would I want to get a tumor transplant?

Vandana Vidyarthi:
Nell gave me a new
pair of corneas, so I went to the hospital to thank her when I was healthy
again. I...I don’t think I’ll ever forget her. (Puts shaky hand over mouth.) My
god, what it must be like to look like that. She’s a saint for doing it. I
don’t think I could live that way.

Nell Gabrielli:
What else am I
growing? Um, right now, I’ve got the eyeball. It’s my first eye. I’ve grown eye
parts before, but never a full eye. Uh, there’s a couple of kidneys on my back,
some liver bits, a bunch of teeth, a thyroid, a little tiny lung that they
don’t think they’ll be able to use, and a heart. The, um, ventricles, they say
they look kinda messed-up. But they say they can put little mechanical
ventricles in it and make it work.

Dr. Burbage:
We’re very excited
about the possibilities for hearts and lungs. Obviously, we won’t be able to
leave them to grow to their full size on Nell. That would be too much of a
strain on her body. Our plan is to remove them once they’re well-formed, but
still small, and then attempt to complete their growth in the lab.