Conception: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (Perfectible Animals Book 1)

by Thomas Norwood

  “You don’t even know what you’ve got.”

  Michael headed down to the kitchen. Washed out moonlight through the kitchen window was enough to see by and he took a glass from the dish rack and filled it with water. His hands shook. He thought about calling an ambulance but realized it was unnecessary. Why was it that at work he could be completely rational but when it came to Annie all reason and control left him?

  “Here, take these.” He propped Annie’s head up under a few pillows and she managed to turn to one side. He fed the pills into her mouth and held the rim of the glass up to her lips. He put a towel down on the bed and made her roll over onto it. He checked her temperature, which was at forty degrees celsius, and he told her that if it got any higher he was going to take her to the hospital whether she liked it or not.

  For the next few hours she fell in and out of consciousness and each time she came to he felt a sense of relief. The rest of the time he sat there in the dim light of the lamp, mopping sweat from her forehead and checking her temperature. He put one towel under her and another on top of her, but even those needed changing regularly.

  “We need an IV drip. You’re losing too much fluid,” Michael said in one of her lucid moments, but then she blacked out again.

  “I have some very bad news,” the doctor said when they ran some tests on her later that day.

  “What is it?” Annie said.

  “You have HIV-4.”

  With global warming, mosquitoes had thrived, spreading to many new regions, even regulated sections of the developed world. Unlike HIV-1 and HIV-2, HIV-4 was very stable, stable enough to persist in the mosquito mouthparts and infect the next human the mosquito bit.

  Annie turned to him and gripped him tightly, burrowing her nails into his skin.

  Michael put his hand on her back. The world around him dissolved and he felt faint.

  “What can we do?” Michael asked the doctor.

  “Nothing.” Annie turned to him. “There’s nothing we can do.”

  “We’ll have to put her on retrovirals so you don’t contract it too,” the doctor said.

  “I’ll sell the company,” he said to Annie that night, referring to the small biotech he had founded a few years earlier. “Geneus will probably buy us out. I’ll sell on the condition they’ll support me in doing some immune system research. We’ll find a cure for this.”

  At that moment in their lives, despite the global catastrophe going on around them, Annie and he were at the peak of their careers. Annie was working at St Vincent’s Hospital as a doctor and he had just developed an artificial chromosome that could be programmed with any number of genetic modifications and inserted into the DNA of a fertilized egg. Just a few months before, a company called Geneus had offered to buy him out.

  “You can’t do that,” Annie said. “That company’s your life.”

  “You’re my life. Everything I do is for you. Without you none of it would mean anything to me.”

  “You’re crazy, Michael. What do you know about the immune system?”

  “I can learn. Geneus has already come up with a number of relevant genetic modifications. They were the ones who came up with a cure for diabetes by inserting insulin producing genes into the pancreas. I can insist they allow me to work with their immune system team. My artificial chromosomes could easily be adapted for that.”

  “And what are you going to tell them? That you want to do it because your wife is sick?”

  “I won’t tell them anything. I’ll tell them that I think I can make a difference. Which I can.”

  “And if they ask you how you’re going to make a difference?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll come up with something.”

  Annie gripped onto him tightly again.

  * * *

  The next morning, two men in suits similar to those who first arrested him come into Michael’s cell, followed by Don.

  “Michael Khan,” one of them says, “we are officially placing you under arrest for attempted terrorism. Anything you say or do may be used against you in a court of law. Do you have any questions?”

  MICHAEL’S STORY

  Melbourne Prison. 2074.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  5 years earlier…

  I WOKE UP. The house was filled with dawn light.

  “What time is it?” Annie, lying beside me, said.

  “Nearly seven. I have to go. How are you feeling?”

  “A little better.”

  The night before Annie had looked terrible. Ever since she’d gotten HIV-4, nearly three years ago now, her energy levels had been decreasing rapidly. It was like she was aging ten years for every year that passed.

  “Would you like some breakfast? Maybe some eggs and a cup of tea would make you feel better.” I had to get to work but, with Annie’s illness, every second spent with her seemed precious.

  “How about a double espresso?”

  “How about some camomile tea?” Annie and I had an ongoing disagreement over the industrial quantities of caffeine she consumed.

  “Oh please, have pity on my dying soul.” She brushed dark hair away from her eyes and sat up against her pillow.

  I laughed. “Camomile tea it is.”

  “You should get to work. It’s a big day for you.”

  “What about you?” I leant in to kiss her gently.

  “I’ll be fine. I’m going in to work too. I’ve got a lot I need to get done.” After she’d been diagnosed, Annie had left her full time job at one of the city’s largest hospitals and now volunteered four days a week at a clinic in the de-reg zone.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I can’t lie around here all day. People need me.”

  “I need you.”

  An hour later, I walked towards the somatic therapy lab at Geneus. The corridor felt designed for more people and being alone in it, hearing my footsteps echo along the linoleum floor, made me uneasy.

  Inside the lab, I swapped my suit jacket for a lab coat. I had been spending more time in my office and in meetings than actually working recently, and it was a relief to be away from the world of internal company politics and finances and to focus on my research again. I often felt like the immune system itself – protecting my project against foreign invaders.

  The team – Justin, Richard, Yolanda and about thirty others – were lined up along benches absorbed in their work: prepping samples, loading the machines, and assessing the data on their coms.

  “I think we’re almost there,” Justin said.

  For the last two and half years, we had been working on a somatic therapy immune-system modification. Somatic therapy involved modifying the DNA of people who were already born. It would enable us to help people who were already sick, like Annie, and Justin’s sister, who also had HIV-4.

  “What have you got?” I said.

  “Have a look at this.” He brought up a video on my visual overlay. “This is a sample from one of our somatically modified primates.”

  I watched a video taken through a fluorescence microscope. Someone added live HIV-4 to different two blood samples – one from the modified primate and the other from an unmodified one. On the modified side I watched as virally-infected T-cells died – lighting up bright red as they did so.

  “That was taken this morning. In one of our somatically modified specimens,” Justin said.

  “What’s the success rate?”

  “Twenty percent. Seventeen percent have shown negative reactions and the rest have shown no signs of it affecting them at all.”

  We talked on for a while, and he reported all the results to me.

  Justin was a gun I had hired straight out of university. He could have gotten a job anywhere, but he stuck it out at Geneus on a lower salary than he deserved with the hope of finding a cure for his sister. I had never told him about Annie, just as I hadn’t told anyone at Geneus, but on many occasions I’d wanted to. Justin’s suffering was obvious and having someone to share it w
ith probably would have made it easier.

  After finishing up with Justin, I headed towards the primate lab where I was due to conduct an experiment based on some unexpected side effects of our immune system research: one that made our macaques far more cooperative. These particular monkeys were unlike any that had ever lived before. We’d inserted bonobo genes by germline transformation as part of our immune system work, and they had become matriarchal, polygamous and non-aggressive, just like bonobos.

  Today we were going to perform a test to check the extent of their behavioral changes. Our macaques were going to be introduced to seven unmodified macaques. Macaques in their natural state defended their territory aggressively, whereas bonobos were more inclined to share, even with strangers.

  The young macaques were restless and squawked in their cages when I walked into the lab, but the older ones paid me little attention, sitting patiently grooming themselves.

  Masanori, my colleague, was measuring cups of oats from a stainless steel drum.

  “Big day,” Masanori said.

  “Everything ready?”

  “Toby’s limping. I think someone must have bitten him in the play cage yesterday.”

  “He probably deserved it.” Toby was a cheeky little monkey who pulled the other monkeys’ fur and stole their food.

  “What time are the others due in?” Masanori said.

  “Eleven.”

  I walked over to the cages, smelling the stench of urine and feces, watching the little brown and white creatures through the wire. I watched Toby make frantic loops of his cage and screech. Toby’s body was almost cat-like, although he stood on hind legs. Masanori was right: he was limping.

  Sika, the oldest female of the group, stared at Toby out of eyes the color of muddied water as if trying to silence him with her thoughts. Although macaques weren’t matriarchal, bonobos were, and Sika was turning out to be the matriarch of this group. Milo, the alpha male, had been demoted.

  The relationship between the two head monkeys had been clearly seen the day before. Masanori and I had put fruit on a tray outside the play pen, too far for the macaques to reach. We had threaded a rope through a ring in the tray and put one end into either side of the pen in such a way that they needed to pull both ends at the same time to get the fruit, something one monkey couldn’t do alone. Milo and Sika had worked this trick out and between them had brought the tray within reach of the cage. It was Sika, though, who pulled the fruit inside the cage and divided it up while the others squawked and rubbed themselves against one another in excitement.

  “Big day today, Sika. Let’s see how they behave,” I said to her. She nodded at me and grunted in a way which suggested she understood.

  The monkeys were able to understand not only our tones of voice, body language and a lot of basic words, but they seemed to have a sixth sense as well. Quite often, minutes before Masanori or I arrived in the lab, they would start looking around as if expecting an arrival. They were right so often that we’d come to predict the arrival of the other by their behavior.

  The monkeys started shaking their cages as Masanori took a bucket of food into the play pen. I followed him in with the remaining fruit and helped spread it out on the concrete floor.

  Masanori went over to Toby’s cage and tried to pull him out, but he clung on tightly to the wire and screamed.

  “Okay, calm down, calm down,” Masanori said. He picked up an extra-large serving of grapes from the bench and handed it to Toby. Stuffing the juicy red globules into his mouth, Toby grunted with pleasure, juice running down his chin as Masanori carried him across to the bench.

  I broke off a few grapes for myself and ate them, then pushed a button which released all the other macaques into the play pen. They greeted each other excitedly, rubbing themselves against one another and grooming each other playfully – just as bonobos would – before feeding.

  Masanori took Toby over to the operating table and we looked at his leg. A small amount of hair was torn away, exposing a bite mark.

  “He obviously got on somebody’s nerves,” I said.

  “Gilly probably. Gilly hates him for some reason. I don’t think the behavioral changes in him are as strong as in some of the others.”

  We applied some antiseptic and a small bandage to Toby’s wound, then released him into the cage with the others.

  At 11am, I received a message on my com saying the truck carrying the seven new macaques had arrived. Masanori and I walked down to the loading bay and watched as two security guards opened up the roller door and unloaded the covered cages into the holding area. Once they’d been scanned and cleared, we stacked them onto trolleys and rolled them down the long, pale-green, disinfected corridors to the lab.

  The modified macaques looked on with solemn eyes as we took the covers off the cages. The new monkeys started shrieking, shaking their doors. A couple of them had urinated.

  I switched the 3D recorder on.

  “Ready?” Masanori said.

  I nodded.

  We released the newcomers from their cages into the six-by-eight-metre pen. They ran inside, screaming like a raiding war party, immediately intimidating and chasing off some of our youngsters, like Toby who had come in for a closer look. The oldest members of the modified group, including Sika and Milo, fanned out and closed in cautiously on the intruders.

  Milo started shrieking, nodding his brown head aggressively, and exposing his short fangs. Gilly and Sam followed his lead, adding to the racket. Sika tried to hush them with a low grunting, and Lady and Ginger joined in with her. The groups were caught in a standoff. The fur on the backs of their tiny necks stood proud and their bodies tensed. Sika tried a “girney” call, a gentle tranquilizer like a cat’s purr that the macaques often used on their young. I recognized it as bonobo behavior translated into macaque language.

  The screaming from both sides continued until Milo and the other modified macaques slowly relaxed as Sika purred to them. Seeing that they were no longer challenged, transfixed by Sika as she continued her call, the newcomers also started to quieten.

  It was Lady, one of our younger females, who went forward next. She sniffed the air in front of her and scratched herself lazily as if to prove to the newcomers that there was nothing to worry about.

  “You go, Lady!” Masanori whispered under his breath.

  As Lady got closer, the larger monkeys from the new group started growling again, raising themselves up on their hind legs.

  “We’d better get ready with the first-aid kit,” I said.

  Despite the aggressive display of the newcomers, Sika, Lady and Milo advanced, just as bonobos would do. As the advance continued, the newcomers’ growls turned to low moans, and one of the males stepped up and sniffed Sika tentatively. Sika cooed to him and put a hand on him to groom him. The male let out a short, high-pitched scream and then slapped her before retreating. Sika held up a hand to where she’d been hit but there was no blood so I suspected the male had done it more out of surprise than a desire to hurt her.

  Milo scuttled towards the one who’d hit Sika, but Sika cooed to him then turned her lips out at him and made a comical little nodding motion together with a small clucking sound. I saw the tension in Milo’s body relax. One of the female newcomers, with pretty white patches around her eyes, approached Milo. He let out a low gabble and suddenly it was love at first sight and they started caressing one another tenderly.

  Both groups came together then and slowly but surely they started cackling and murmuring and grooming one another.

  Masanori and I turned to one another with smiles on our faces.

  I walked into the board room later that afternoon. It seemed everything was coming together. The possibility we might finally be able to cure Annie made me feel as if gravity had suddenly weakened.

  Klaus Hofferman, CEO of Geneus, sat at the head of the table surrounded by the other board members. He was working, his fingers moving in the air in front of him as he manipulated objects on hi
s visual overlay. His thin gray hair was brushed back – exposing his widow’s peak – and his eyes were turned down at the edges. His face was rigid except for his jaw grinding from side to side in reaction to whatever was in front of him on his overlay.

  The rest of the group was also working. Usually I would join them until Klaus was ready, but today I poured myself some black coffee from the pot on the table and waited for the meeting to start.

  I looked around at the board members. Beside Masanori was Rachel, the marketing director, thick brown hair over a face too slender to be the result of natural selection and more likely to be the result of cosmetic surgery. At only a couple of thousand dollars a pop, if you weren’t operated-on these days you could pretty much say goodbye to your chances of ever finding a job outside tele-marketing. Next to Rachel was Zhao, the chief financial officer. Half Chinese and half Russian, he cut a striking figure in his blue pin-striped suit. Zhao worked magic on the Geneus books and it was rumored he had numerous copies of our financial files at any given time: one for investors, one for banks, and one for the government. All completely legitimate of course – it was a matter of perspective. Either way, he’d kept the company afloat through some rough weather. With economies around the world falling like dominoes, any company which managed to keep operating was doing okay for itself, especially one like ours which ate hundreds of millions in R&D.

  Around from Zhao was Klaus, and on the other side of him was Anthony Simons. Anthony was chief operations manager for a number of divisions of the company and for the past year had been progressively more and more against our immune-system project. It not only threatened the other projects, he claimed, but threatened the financial viability of the entire company. Anthony and I had gotten on quite well until Klaus chose to cut Anthony’s pet project – improving athletic skills – so he could redirect the funds from it towards our immune system work. These days we hardly spoke to one another. Next to Anthony was John, balding head of the legal department, and besides him sat Sue-Ling Song, Janet Greeves, and James Charlston, all major shareholders.