The agents exchanged glances at that news. “Well, thank you Dr. Greene, you have been a big help in this matter,” she said. We’ll be in touch if we have any further questions. Good day.”
At that, the agents turned and walked out the door without glancing back or speaking further.
“Very strange. Very strange indeed,” Dr. Greene said aloud to himself. Shaking his head, he sat down at his desk, trying to think of what he should do now.
30
Washington, DC
Friday, Jan 8, 2021
Rusty’s Home
“Hannah is where?” Rusty shouted into the phone, in disbelief at what this female DHS agent had just told him, “and for what reason?” After listening for a few seconds, he quieted down, and added, “Yes, she is my daughter. Yes, I work directly for President James. Yes, she is authorized to access this information. Listen, Hannah is a genius, but she’s ‘special needs’. If she even knew that this was classified information, she would have been simply following a routine accessing it. I’m sure she never considered that routine as being wrong. It’s just what she does every single day. Thank you for telling me. Let me make some calls and get this straightened out. Please see to it that she’s treated well, while I call the President.” He pressed END on the phone and just stared at it. “Oh Hannah, what have you gotten yourself into?” he asked no one but himself, out loud, shaking his head.
At the other end of the call, the female officer hung up, looking at her partner with wide eyes, and said; “OH SHIT! He does work for the President.”
Pouring himself a generous shot of bourbon, Rusty sat back down at his desk and put in a call to President James’ office. In less than a minute, he had the President himself on the line. “What is it Rusty?” he asked. “I have a meeting in minutes.”
Rusty quickly explained the embarrassing situation to his boss, being careful to withhold emotion from his voice entirely. That wouldn’t help at all here. “I know that this is a highly unusual request Sir, but she’s actually the one who figured out the problem I told you about the other day. She’s an absolute genius that can help us tremendously in our current dilemma, but she doesn’t stand a chance in the environment she’s in at the moment. I just got the phone call from Homeland Security in Clemson, SC. Is there any way that you can get her released into my custody, so I can talk this out with her first hand and think about what needs to be done, instead of losing my mind here, and us losing our best source of information on this problem? I will control her, if I can just have her here with me.”
“Of course I can Rusty. But you’d better do just that. Control that girl. I’ll have her brought to your home. Be there waiting. And Rusty? I expect to hear from you Monday with assurance that I’ve done the right thing here. Don’t make me regret this.”
“Thank-you, Sir. You won’t regret this. You have my word. Good-bye.” Rusty turned his attention back to the glass, again shaking his head.
At 10:00 p.m. that night, the doorbell rang. It was two angry Homeland Security officers escorting Hannah, in handcuffs. Rusty had to sign for her release into his custody. The officers were polite to Rusty, but they never even looked at Hannah again after taking the cuffs off. Rusty was afraid to think what the reason for that was.
He poured a second glass of bourbon and pushed it across the desk at her. “Sit down,” he said.
“Rusty, this was total bullshit,” Hannah said, a bit loudly.
“Sit,” Rusty repeated in a calm, quiet voice. “We need to talk. Just get yourself calm and have a drink with me. Then please tell me what the hell is going on.”
That drew a more reserved, yet still angry look from Hannah. “Ok Rusty,” she said, with a bit of a smart-assed tone. ‘Sir, yes Sir!’ she thought.
Rusty sipped his bourbon and looked at his daughter. At 24, she looked just like her mother had all of those years ago, if you overlooked the piercings, tattoos, blue highlights in her hair and weird gothic looking clothes. ‘She has her mother’s temper too,’ Rusty thought, ‘but she got her smarts from me.’
Finishing one glass and pouring herself another, Hannah began telling Rusty the story from the beginning. “About a month ago, I got a project assigned to me by my professor, Dr. Greene. He charged me with finding the connection, if any, with the new GM/hybrid corn from Walsanto Seed and some odd phenomenon to do with chickens that had eaten it and their eggs. You should know that generally speaking, I detest genetically modified food, period.”
“OK, now I know. Just keep telling me the story.”
“Well, he had samples for me, consisting of normal looking corn kernels, both whole and cracked. There were also normal looking chicken eggs that supposedly would not hatch, no matter what. There were also these weird, funky, gray/green, smooth skinned chicken carcasses with no feathers. That kinda freaked me out a bit. Alien chickens or something I thought to myself-- “
“And what did you do with these samples?” Rusty asked.
“I studied the skin of the chickens for the first couple of days. I couldn’t get over that. Smooth skin, with no feather follicles, looks really strange on a chicken; I’m here to tell you. It was only the skin that looked odd though, the flesh underneath appeared normal to look at. After some testing however, it became obvious that their skin wasn’t the only thing odd about those chickens.
“I asked for some whole corn plants to be brought to me for testing, along with some organic corn plants. Right away, the color of the GM plants, as well as their size jumped out at me. They were huge compared to the organic plants. They had five ears of corn on them as compared to two on the organic plants. The kernels were the same size, color and everything, but the GM ears had WAY more kernels per ear than the organic. The biggest thing I noticed though was that the color of the GM corn plants and the color of the skin, on the huge alien looking chickens, were almost identical.”
“Good observation Hannah,” Rusty said. “I’ve seen those chickens myself, and I never put that together in my head.”
“Wait, you’ve seen these chickens too? Where did you see them?”
“In a South Carolina extension agent’s office, named Gerald Davies. Weirdest damned thing I’ve ever seen, for sure,” Rusty said.
“That might have been who brought the samples to Dr. Greene, come to think of it, but I’m not positive. Weird that we’re both looking into the same green chickens, huh?” she smiled.
“So, what similarities did you find?” he asked.
“Well, because of the color match, a colleague suggested doing a DNA comparison. That led us to the strangest thing that you could imagine. The DNA results showed conclusively that the corn plant and the chicken that we tested were related! Familial matches that suggested that they were close relatives.”
“No way,” Rusty said. “How in the hell can a corn plant be related to a bird? That’s just not possible!”
“Way,” she replied. “It’s not supposed to be possible, in nature, but when people start screwing around with genetics like this, well, that’s not nature, is it? The only way that this adds up in my mind, is that viable cells from that corn plant, still containing that live virus got into the bloodstream of that chicken. That could only have happened by that chicken eating that corn. Then, that virus would have to have spread to cells in the chicken’s bloodstream, and started multiplying. Now comes the scary part. It didn’t make sense that the corn plant that we had tested could be the very one that the chicken had eaten from, right? So we tested other corn from other plants that came from different fields. They were like identical! Not like related, but I mean identical. That led us to test another smooth skinned green chicken from a different farm entirely. It was identical to the first one. Somehow, whoever put this genetic cocktail together has stumbled across a recipe that creates cells that clone themselves, enter a new host, combine with the host’s cells, then start multiplying like mad!”
“Holy crap,” was all Rusty could manage for a minute. “That’s bad.
That’s very bad. Hannah, if these cells can do this, why hasn’t this ever happened before?”
“Do you want the stay up all night and get drunk with Hannah version, or the short version?” she said with a playfully sarcastic tone.
“Whichever version makes me understand this as best I can. This is my job AND my daughter now, so whatever time you need, you’ve got!”
“Alrighty then,” Hannah said, “but I’ll be switching over to Coke then, before I fall over. I’m kind of a light-weight.
“There are multiple ways of getting genes into a cell. In this case, the genes were purposely introduced into the corn plants through a process known as viral transfection. The short version of that is; someone added certain bamboo and algae DNA into a suitable plant virus and infected a corn plant with it. The exact science used to accomplish this doesn’t matter for purposes of this conversation, as much as the fact that they did it.
“After the corn plant’s cells have the extra DNA added, they are said to be transduced. Transduced means simply; a change in cell properties caused by adding new DNA. This new DNA recombined with the corn plant’s chromosomes to produce huge numbers of transduced cells that transformed the plant gradually into a giant gray/green wonder that grew like crazy and produced huge ears of corn. This kind of viral transfection is never supposed to reach the nucleus of a plant’s cells, and is not supposed to integrate into the plant’s genome. That means that the next generation of this plant’s seed is not supposed to contain the virus. In fact, it’s nearly impossible, which is weird, because in this case, that’s exactly what it did. That told us there must be another factor in play, so in further unraveling the DNA, we found evidence of another gene having been added. What is known as a ‘terminator gene’ had also been added. Though I’ve studied them in theory, this is the first time I’ve actually ever came across one physically.”
“Ok, hold on,” Rusty said. “Explain this terminator gene.”
“So, there’s different kinds of them, but for now, let’s focus just on this one. This particular terminator gene is specifically designed to kill the second generation reproductive capabilities of this corn. To do this, a special attribute has to be developed for this virus that actually allows it to penetrate the nucleus of the infected cell. Then, it can add itself to the genetic sequence, so the second generation seed would carry it. The first generation seed grows the same fantastic gray/green corn plant and produces seed that is clinically the same in every way, and supposedly good to eat, with even better nutritional values. However, when that seed tries to germinate, it basically self-destructs by releasing a toxin that it develops within itself, destroying the necessary proteins for reproduction, actually killing the seed’s embryo.”
“This would be really interesting stuff, if the implications weren’t so terrible,” Rusty said. “I see why you eat this genetic stuff up so much now. I never quite got it before.”
That got a big smile from Hannah for a second, but her look grew serious again, as she continued. “We believe that this virus transferred from the corn to those chickens, then to their eggs, and that it might also transfer to any other animal eating that corn as well. We also believe that any carnivorous animal that ate any animal that had eaten that corn, or their eggs, or their milk may also become affected by that virus. There’s simply no reason why it wouldn’t. That’s not supposed to be possible, but by some freak accident, it has happened, making green skinned chickens with eggs that won’t hatch.”
“But how is that possible?” asked Rusty.
“When the chickens eat the corn kernels, even if they’re cracked, the warmth and wetness of the chicken’s stomach simulates the conditions for germination, and that triggers each cell of the kernel to release its payload of toxins, and the virus. Because of the speed at which these cells divide and multiply, thanks to the algae DNA, they immediately begin working to outpace normal cell replacement and creation rates, thus begin increasing the overall percentage of the GM cells in the chicken’s body. Thanks to the bamboo DNA, the chicken grows faster and matures faster than any creature we’ve ever seen before. That’s the nature of bamboo. The division of these GM cells produces a residue that causes the gray/green skin, and begins killing feather follicles. As the follicles disappear, the skin smoothes out of course. From 0%-50% overall GM cell content, this chicken can still produce an egg that will hatch, but the resulting chick will be a green one containing 100% GM cells. As soon as overall GM cell percentage in the original chicken reaches 51%, all its feathers are gone and this chicken is sterile, meaning its eggs appear perfect, but they’ll never hatch. Its eggs also contain the virus,” she answered.
“So where would it ever stop?” Rusty thought out loud.
“Good question, Rusty,” she answered. Once these transduced cells containing that virus get into another animal or human that ate the chicken or its eggs, they would replicate themselves much like a cancer or tumor cell does. The addition of one single transduced cell would take a long time to affect an entire body, because of simple mathematics. The introduction of the virus containing the additional DNA into a larger number of cells is infinitely more effective. When inserted into a fully grown animal or human, the divisions of cells starts out affecting total cellular percentages very slowly, but speeds up by the power of doubling, and eventually outpaces the normal cells rate of division.
“When inserted into an embryonic situation, the division of cells that create growth assures nearly 100% of the host’s total cells contain the additional DNA.
“Notable effects of the growing percentage of transduced cells are; more energy and strength, more endurance and overall speed. Growth in lean muscle mass. Overall size and height, being determined in early growth stages, shouldn’t be affected in adults, would be somewhat affected in existing youth that eat it, but would be greatly affected in an embryonic situation. The loss of hair or feather follicles and change of skin color is directly proportional to overall cellular replacement percentages with cells containing the new DNA in the host. Meaning, the more food containing the new cells and the virus that the animal or human eats, the faster the process happens.
“There would be a point of no return percentage-wise that once crossed, would erase any hope of reversal. At 51% cellular content, the host has zero hair follicles, gray/green skin, and would be totally and irreversibly sterile.
“Exposure to direct sunlight or artificial full spectrum lights wouldn’t sunburn animals or humans with gray/green skin. It would cause the algae DNA to deepen the green color of the skin and would provide an unnatural boost of strength similar to an adrenaline rush to the animal or human, causing unpredictable results.
“What I had just begun looking at on the day that they arrested me, was corn by-products as an ingredient in other foods. It seems likely to me that the more food humans eat that contain high fructose corn syrup or corn products made with the new corn, the faster their transformation would go. After they lose all of their hair and are gray skinned, they too would be sterile. That would explain the birth of any gray skinned human babies, and you know what else that may very well mean.”
“Is there anything that can be done at this point to stop this Hannah?”
“Well, that just depends on how much of this corn is out there being ingested by living creatures,” she replied slowly, and thoughtfully.
“Oh. My. God,” Rusty said slowly, looking into the fire burning in the fireplace. “I can see it now. This will make it into humans too. It’ll cause an extinction level event, taking place over just one generation, because I did my job really, really well.”
“What are you saying Rusty?”
“That I made damned sure that every major food manufacturer around the globe showed their support of the President’s ‘Feeding the World’ initiative by using every available kernel of Walsanto’s corn first, before using anything else. This corn has already replaced traditional corn in anything and everything that corn is used in, in any
form. Now, it’s into wheat and oats too.”
31
Washington, DC
Monday, Jan 11, 2021
The Oval Office
“How was your weekend with young Miss Withers?” asked President James, looking across his desk at Rusty.
“Mr. President, I’m not really sure how to tell you this,” Rusty said, looking around the room nervously.
“You can speak freely here Rusty,” President James assured him. “No one can hear, but the two of us. Go ahead.”
“Sir, I think we’ve made the biggest mistake in the history of mankind.”
“How so?” asked the President.
“By taking over this Walsanto Seed project and using it to spearhead your Feeding the World strategy to win the war against China.”
“Then lucky for me that I don’t pay you as a military strategist Rusty,” said the President sharply, because my plan has worked perfectly. We have every country on the planet, save one, literally eating out of our hands. Not even China would dare stand against the whole world.”
“I’m afraid that that is exactly our problem, Sir. Please allow me to explain…”
Rusty did his best to recreate the dialog he’d had with Hannah all weekend concerning this. The President’s reactions mirrored exactly how Rusty had felt while Hannah had been explaining all of this to him. He looked just like he’d been punched in the gut.
“I recommend that we get every bit of this stuff off the market, get it recalled and destroy it safely somehow,” Rusty said, finishing his increasingly passionate piece of advice.
“Well damn, damn, damn,” said President James, turning his back to Rusty to look out the window. After a long span of silence, he turned back around and sat down behind his desk, looking at Rusty. After more silence, he said; “Thank-you Rusty. I’m going to have to think about this before making any kind of move. For now, I want you to go home and spend time with your daughter. Not one word of this is to be shared in any fashion with anyone until you hear back from me on what I decide. Understood?”
The Rise of Walsanto (Genetic Apocalypse Book 3) Page 18
