The God Organ

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  He remembered a moment when he and Audrey had been holding hands, years ago, walking near Millennium Park and the enormous holodisplays adorning the fountains that made them seem to dance with spurting water, even on that winter evening. He wondered how he could have felt so attached to Audrey, so in love, and now he could look at Jacqueline with a passion almost as intense.

  Gripping her hand in his, he wondered if his relationship with her was nothing but an ill-fated affair—knowing that it likely would become an ill-fated affair. He felt almost silly, imagining how an outsider would view the situation. Serious, determined Matthew spoiling his hard-earned career with an unconventional relationship.

  Jacqueline spoke first, breaking the tension. “I think it would be best if I took a breather. I’m going to call up a friend for lunch.”

  “Fair enough. I think I’ve got my work cut out for me today anyway.”

  “What are you planning on doing?” Jacqueline asked as she put on her coat. “We can’t work on the universal delivery vector until regulations gets back to us, and we’ve already scoured through all the medical reports for Jonathan, Joel, and the rest of them.”

  “Well...I’m still not sure about some outside group sabotaging the Sustain. I mean, we didn’t find any signs of foul play, extraneous injections, lung irritation signifying a possible aerosol, nothing strange in the autopsies or reports...I figured it wouldn’t hurt to cover all our bases.”

  “Okay. So, what’s that mean?” Jacqueline froze at the door to the office.

  “I want to get to the root of the problem. I want to do some more investigation into the DNA of their Sustain organs.”

  Jacqueline glanced at her comm card, then at the window separating their office from the lab. Glass vials and spent solutions littered the room. They had been working far too much to worry about cleanliness. After all, they were only doing research, not production.

  She raised an eyebrow. “All the pre-implantation verifications checked out, though. There were no problems in production.”

  “Still, it wouldn’t hurt to compare the DNA content of the delivery vectors we have on record with the tissue samples we have in holding from each person’s Sustain. You know, the samples we needed for the FDA audit? I know the autopsy reports have written off the cause of deaths as strokes, and there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with the Sustains at an organ-level examination. But we might as well make sure that the DNA wasn’t compromised after production.”

  Jacqueline’s gaze focused somewhere above Matthew. She was clearly thinking about the implications of his investigation into the genetic content of the Sustain samples returned from each of the stroke victims. “Right, of course. But you’ve got to get that from regulations. They need a bit of advance notice.”

  Matthew smiled. “Sometimes I think you have no faith in me. I already took care of that.”

  “You could’ve told me, if that’s what you were planning. We’re in this together, remember?” Jacqueline frowned.

  “Sorry. I suppose I should have.”

  “I can stay and get this started with you.”

  “No, I think you’re right. Let’s take a little break from each other for a couple of hours. That’s all it’ll take for me to get this done, anyway.”

  “Okay. Just let me know what you find out when I get back.”

  As she walked out the door, Matthew noticed the comm card on her desk. “You forgot your comm card.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Jacqueline said. “But that’s actually a card I found this morning in the garage.”

  “Why do you still have it?”

  “I never bothered opening the ID to see whose it was.”

  “Ah,” Matthew said. “Maybe I’ll check it out while you’re gone—see if I can find the owner.”

  “Suit yourself.” Jacqueline smirked, a hint of her more jovial self returning. “But if there’s a reward, be sure to give me the credit.”

  For a short while after she had rushed off, Matthew set up the lab for his experiments. He warmed up the desktop DNA sequencer and the holoscreen next to it. Running a quick standard to ensure the machine was working properly, he watched as blue, red, yellow, and green nucleotides flew through the air. The small white box quieted as the standard confirmed an expected read: all codons were accounted for and projected translations into proteins were accurate within a slight deviation.

  He strode down the halls, his mood lighter.

  When he arrived in the regulations department, he entered a laboratory area that contained a massive walk-in cooler. Whitney was working at her holoscreen, scrolling through a series of microscopic views of cells. From the woman’s comm card, an indecipherable mess of code projected into the air. She jumped and closed out of the code when Matthew said hello.

  “Sorry to scare you.”

  Whitney laughed. “No problem. I don’t often get visitors.”

  Matthew pointed at the cell images on her holoscreen. “What do you have there? Looks like some of the results of some percutaneous catheter therapy.”

  “Yep. Can you believe how crazy that is? It’s hard to believe it was only a couple decades ago that people were sticking metal objects like stents through plastic tubes into their blood vessels. Seems a bit barbaric now.”

  Matthew chuckled. “Right. And then they’d have to take warfarin to prevent blood clotting. It’s crazy that rat poison was actually used as medicine.”

  “I’m sure people will look back at the Sustain, viral gene delivery, and nanoparticles as archaic someday, too.”

  “Seems crazy to think that might be true.”

  “It all just sends shivers down my spine.” She squinted, as if in thought, and looked away. “To be honest, what really sends shivers down my spine is the damned cold weather. I’m not used to that where I’m from. I prefer a warmer climate, that’s for sure.” Her eyes caught Matthew’s again. “Anyway, I gather you’re not here to chitchat.”

  “I’ve got to ask you for a favor,” he said. “I’m going to need tissue samples and genetic records for some Sustain organs that we’ve recently acquired.”

  “You’ve already got approval from George?”

  Matthew slid his finger across his comm card, sending the list of names and tissue samples he needed to Whitney’s card, along with a note signed by the freshly promoted head of regulations.

  “George’s been doing all right, considering the transition. Kinda hard to see Jonathan replaced so quickly.” Whitney scanned the list on her comm card.

  “It seems like he’s always running to another meeting with Preston upstairs,” Matthew said. “I only ever see him in the hall.”

  Whitney selected a few commands on her holoscreen. The liquid nitrogen freezing tank next to the large door of the walk-in cooler hissed and spit out the samples through an automated feeder. Whitney collected the small vials and dropped them in a self-cooling metal container for Matthew.

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “He seems awfully busy. I hardly see him like I did when Jonathan...when Jonathan was still around. Strange about the guards, though.”

  Matthew’s ears perked up. “What guards?”

  “George told me they plan on adding a security drone to keep our friend over here company at night.” She motioned to the walk-in cooler and the nitrogen tank holding the Sustain tissue samples.

  “Why’s that?”

  “It seems to me the higher-ups suspect some foul play within the company. What do you think?”

  “No idea. I wouldn’t have suspected it, but I guess we can’t rule anything out.” He made a mental note to tell Jacqueline about these extra precautions and see if she knew what was going on.

  “True.” Whitney leaned against her desk. “What do you plan on doing with these samples, anyway?”

  “Just some DNA sequencing, protein analysis and such.”

  A worried look spread across her face. “That’s what I thought when I received your initial request. You know I was going to
do that anyway, right?”

  “Oh, I’m not trying to do your job or anything. I just wanted to look at it for some research questions, you know?”

  “Okay, then. Let me know if you see anything interesting, will you?”

  “Sure.” Matthew made for the door. “Thanks again for the samples.”

  “No problem,” Whitney said, already lost in her holoscreen, examining old projections of cells from late-twentieth-century medical research articles.

  ***

  When Matthew returned to his laboratory, he took microscale-sized samples from the tissues and placed them into tiny plastic wells. He placed his comm card on a nearby bench and streamed music into the room via the comm card’s virtual 3D sound system. The steady rock beat reverberated in him, in rhythm with his repetitive movements back and forth across the lab bench, moving cell samples and isolating DNA.

  He loaded the samples into a plastic tray. It slid into the sequencer and he swiped the machine’s projected display to start it.

  DNA sequences flashed across the holoscreen as the machine read the genes present in the retrieved Sustain samples. The possibilities of uncovering an unexpected genetic mutation caused by the Sustain or a cancerous proliferation of cells within the Sustain tissues could shock LyfeGen. Such a revelation would send the company into a spiral of worsening publicity, FDA recalls, bankruptcy, and mass layoffs. There would be no turning back for the company if that information became public.

  If such a problem did exist, Whitney would eventually come across it herself. She had only just received the samples and she was a known procrastinator, preferring to scour the web for old scientific literature instead of doing her work. She had another two weeks before she needed to submit her full reports on the returned Sustain samples anyway, since the cause of death for the patients wasn’t attributed to the artificial organs. No evidence that the Sustain caused strokes had surfaced, so the doctors tended to take the easiest approach and avoid filling out the paperwork required for a death due to medical device failure.

  That was fortunate for Whitney, giving her more time to view archaic microscope images and let Matthew do her job for her.

  While the sequencer hummed to a stop, he wondered why Whitney still had her job. How could such an inefficient individual keep a position like that in a market overflowing with eager applicants? He chalked it up to bureaucracy and the current distractions pressing the behemoth that LyfeGen was becoming.

  He ran a script to compare the genetic information collected from the tissue samples with the genetic data files in LyfeGen’s production database for the patients. This would enable him to compare the genes actually present in the deceaseds’ Sustains and their resulting protein outputs with the genes that were supposed to have been delivered during each patient’s original Sustain implantation and subsequent updates. Simply put, he was checking to make sure all the right DNA was there.

  However, the script produced an array of glaring differences between the patient’s DNA and the DNA that was supposed to have been implanted. The differences between actual samples and the genes they were supposed to have were striking.

  His mouth fell open. Such drastic errors would not only cause embolic strokes, but even more terrible side-effects. He ran a second script to simulate the outcomes of these genetic differences.

  The list of problems was staggering. Immune system failure, autoimmune destruction, organ failures, systemic clotting of the vasculature, autonomic nervous system failure, among a barrage of other conditions. He imagined the horrifying diseases and medical conditions that might manifest themselves in other patients that shared these defects.

  If Joel and the others had been living with these conditions, it was a miracle that the only apparent side effect they had suffered was an embolic stroke.

  Something else was wrong.

  He called Whitney. When she didn’t answer, he tore off his gloves and sped back down to her lab.

  “Are these samples correct?” Matthew spread the empty plastic vials across the table in front of her holoscreen.

  Whitney frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “These samples can’t be correct. The DNA doesn’t match up.”

  “Did you perform your genetic sequencing right?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “No idea, then.”

  Agitated, Matthew exited in a huff.

  Back in his own lab, he sat on a stool. The projected display of predicted side effects and outcomes of the genetic issues present in the Sustains glowed in the air in front of him.

  A thought struck him.

  He typed a command into the computer next to him, and another list scrolled across his screen. A list of five names was selected and presented, each name matching one of the Sustain samples he had run.

  None of the names matched any of the five people that the samples were supposed to have been from.

  One patient had allegedly committed suicide. Another had died due to a car accident, yet another from a ski accident, and another from a form of uterine cancer with no cure yet in the Sustain arsenal. One man had drowned.

  He vaguely recognized the name of the man who had died in the car accident, though he couldn’t place it. It was strange enough that anybody could die in a car accident; such occurrences had been virtually eliminated with the advent of automated driving.

  Still, none of the deaths appeared linked to a Sustain organ or its failure, much less a stroke. There were no discernible links to any of the original five names Matthew had first sought to investigate.

  There must have been a mix-up in the regulations’ sample collections.

  Whitney had claimed to know nothing and Matthew contemplated pressing the matter further, but figured that she either truly didn’t know, or she was lying for some reason. If she was lying, there was no indication he could get her to tell the truth. Certainly, he could bring the matter up with George, since he was the new acting regulations manager.

  But Matthew couldn’t quell the nagging suspicion that someone in regulations might have sabotaged the samples. It must have been an inside job, and everyone had to be suspected until he could prove otherwise.

  The task of figuring out who was involved appeared insurmountable. Matthew was no detective. All he knew was lab work and physiology.

  He recalled Jacqueline’s suggestion that an outside group might be involved and sought to reconcile the two theories. Maybe the group had corrupted someone at LyfeGen, like a cancerous cell from a malignant tumor, invading and proliferating in another organ.

  Sitting down in his office chair, he played with the unclaimed comm card Jacqueline had found. He fiddled with it, lost in his thoughts. Wrestling with ideas and unable to come up with a solution, he distracted himself with the homeless card.

  He turned it on.

  A loadscreen video of a blond-haired couple appeared. They waved as he flipped the card over in his hands. He scrolled through the contact list, determined to find a “Wife” or “Hubby” or someone to call to notify the individual who had lost the card. But it turned off again after a quick blip, suggesting all active software had shut down. He tried to turn the card on again, but it had stopped working.

  Flipping the card onto Jacqueline’s desk, he exhaled slowly. Yet another mystery that he had failed to solve.

  Chapter 24

  Cody Warren

  November 19, 2063

  Cody stared into his glass, swirling it around slowly. Foam rose up and spiraled. In a sad attempt to meld together some metaphor about the universe in the pint glass, he imagined each bubble as its own burgeoning galaxy.

  But he couldn’t conjure a satisfactory meaning-of-life insight and settled for simply taking a swig of the cold brew. The hoppy pale ale didn’t satisfy him as it usually did. Instead, his mind was far from the poor lighting and the crusty wooden bar in front of him. Today had been exceptionally difficult and the four beers he had chugged in the past hour and a half hadn’t assuaged
his anger.

  ***

  Cody had been working on a particularly stubborn bot meant for vacuuming, mopping, and polishing the floors around NanoTech.

  His manager, Harold, could barely maintain eye contact when he approached. “Can we have a seat in my office to talk in private?”

  Cody looked around in the machine shop strewn with nanofabrication materials, soldering guns, loose fiber optics, and a couple of 3D printers. He wiped his hands on one of the shop rags. “Ain’t no one here, boss.” He wiped a stream of perspiration off his forehead.

  “Well, uh, there’s nicer—I mean, more comfortable seating, you know, in my office.”

  “Fine.”

  He followed Harold as the man waddled into an office filled with pictures of real and prototype fighter planes. A couple of images were holoprojections. The planes repeatedly raced across the wall, leaving behind licks of flame and billowing contrails. Cody always wondered why a low-level maintenance manager like Harold harbored this extraordinary passion for fighter jets. He thought the answer might be too depressing to find out, though, so he refrained from inquiring.

  “Have a seat,” Harold said, staring at the cluttered desk full of model planes and projection models.

  Cody imagined the man playing with the toys and making sound effects. He fought to withhold a smile. “What’s going on?”

  “There’s some bad news, I’m afraid.” Harold’s voice sounded shallow and distant. His bottom lip quivered.

  “What is it?”

  “We’re going to have to cut back your hours.” Harold fidgeted with a Northrop Grumman F/A-44 Griffin. Cody knew the plane’s name and the fact that it weighed 5,600 pounds empty and 14,500 pounds at maximum load because Harold would blabber on about the plane’s specs incessantly when he had nothing else to say.

  “You know that piloted planes are a thing of the past,” Cody had said when Harold first told him about his passion for fighter jets. “Drones have pretty much replaced them all.”

  “I don’t care,” Harold replied. “They’re magnificent pieces of machinery, every one of them. Look how advanced they’ve become over the past ten decades.” Harold had waved his arms around his office, his tone defensive.