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

by Thomas Norwood

I stood up and took the bottle of wine from the bench and finished it off.

  “There you go. See? All better,” Annie said.

  “It’s not all better at all.”

  We ate dinner and discussed possibilities. We could try to convince Gendigm to invest without requiring a controlling share, or we could steal all the research and start working for Gendigm in a secret lab somewhere, coming up with our own version of the process that wouldn’t conflict with Geneus’s. Maybe we could even get Geneus to sell their data to Gendigm, seeing as they probably wouldn’t have a use for a lot of it now. We drank three bottles of wine and our plans became more and more hair-brained, leading right up to me being a double agent for the Indonesians in return for the money to go on with our immune system research.

  I went to sleep early but woke up at 4am in a whirl of anxious thought that I wasn’t able to control. Annie was still asleep, so I crept out of bed and went down the corridor into my office. I hardly needed an office these days, as everything I needed was on my com, but I still had a bookshelf in there with some old books on it and my favorite leather armchair which Annie wanted me to get rid of.

  I had been so stunned the day before that I hadn’t let Gendigm know what was happening, so I sent a message to Bruno. Then, with nothing else to do, I started playing an old video game that I used to play back in university. It was a jet fighter simulation, where you had to shoot as many of the enemy planes as you could before they shot you. It was absorbing and for a while it helped me take my mind off things.

  Then my com beeped and I logged out of the game and checked my messages. Bruno had sent me a reply. There was nothing that Gendigm could do for the moment, but he told me that having access to military facilities and equipment might not be the worst thing in the world. There might still be hope yet, he said, which I didn’t really believe but found comforting nonetheless.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THAT THURSDAY, I boarded the company jet with Klaus and Anthony. Trying to appear enthusiastic about this project was even harder than trying to remain positive with Annie about her chances of survival. The only good thing I could see coming out of this was that we would finally have the technology to bring about the somatic modifications that we’d been trying to achieve – although I knew the purposes this would be put to were totally the opposite of what I wanted.

  I wondered if the military was going to perform a background check on all of us and potentially turn up evidence of Annie’s disease. One of the things that had attracted us to Dr Baxter in the first place was his insistence on doing everything manually, so unless they’d had me physically tracked, they probably wouldn’t find anything.

  The plane took off and Anthony and Klaus chatted excitedly about the possibilities of working for the military. I stared out the window at the large curve that marked the edge of the de-reg zone. On the regulated side, things were green and ordered. Then came a jumbled mess of gray and brown shanty towns. Beyond that, it was mostly desert.

  An hour later, we arrived at a military airport about a hundred kilometers west of Canberra. We were met by two young bureaucrats in suits and transported to the huge, gray, flying fortress of a military helicopter. We followed our guides up a short ramp into the back, and the door lifted up and closed behind us. There was a bench along each wall, made for ten men each. We strapped ourselves in and in less than a minute we were being hauled skyward again.

  The trip took longer than I expected and by the time we landed I had absolutely no idea where we were. When we stepped out, all I could see was a clearing in a pine plantation just large enough for the heli-pad. The straight rows of nearly identical trees seemed to go on forever, and the scent of pine needles hit me.

  Four officers were waiting for us in full uniform. A bulky, blue-suited man of about sixty, blonde hair and blue eyes, came towards us and greeted us.

  “I’m General Savage,” he shouted to us over the whir of the winding down blades. “Pleased to meet you.”

  We introduced ourselves and General Savage led us towards a concrete shelter on the side of the clearing. The uniformed officers fell into line behind us. We climbed aboard a lift and slid deep into the belly of the earth.

  Doors opened onto a wide reception area where two young women were working. A glass wall separated us from an open plan office with dozens of busy workstations.

  “Just this way,” General Savage said.

  We followed him through a side door, past a security checkpoint where we were scanned, and along a glass corridor into a meeting room. Here, our entourage waited outside.

  A table for eight sat in the middle of the room and we all took seats. Opaque windows filtered soft light, no doubt artificial yet producing the effect of sunlight.

  “Coffee, tea?” Savage said. “We’re just waiting for the Prime Minister, and a couple of my colleagues.”

  “The Prime Minister is coming?” Klaus said, obviously impressed.

  “Yes. She wanted to weigh in on this. This is an incredibly important step for us, as I’m sure you’ll understand. Bio-warfare goes against all the conventions of war established in the last hundred years. Any thought of even preparing for it must be taken very seriously.”

  “Of course,” Klaus said.

  A few minutes later, a face I’d seen hundreds of times on the net but never in reality came into the room, surrounded by three other aging military officers similar in appearance to General Savage. Introductions were made and we all sat around the table.

  Susan Green, prime minister of the regulated zone of Australia, was nearly sixty and looked it. Most older women these days opted for stem-cell skin reconstruction, but Susan probably thought her lined face leant her an air of authority. She scanned us all with quick, intelligent eyes and said, “Thank you for coming,”

  “It’s our pleasure,” Klaus said.

  “We’re here today to talk about your research into the genetic modification of the immune system,” Susan said. “I’m led to believe that you have come up with a way not only to improve the immune system of the new-born but of those already born. Somatic modification, is that right?”

  Klaus and Anthony looked at me.

  “That’s right, Mrs. Green,” I said.

  “Please, call me Susan,” she said.

  “Thanks. We still haven’t fully completed our research but we do believe we have developed a technique which, combined with the right gene insertion technology, will be viable.” I explained how our current modifications had proven to make monkeys far more resistant to disease and how all we needed was to improve the mechanism to accurately perform those modifications.

  “It does sound extremely promising,” Susan said.

  “What is it you would like to use the technology for?” I asked.

  The four military officers looked at me as if I were being impertinent.

  “I think that’s a matter of national security,” General Savage said.

  “It’s okay, George,” Susan said. “They’re going to need to know anyway.” She turned back to me. “It’s come to the attention of our intelligence agents that the Indonesians have developed a similar technology to the one you’re working on. It’s our belief that they are going to release a virus that will quickly decimate groups of people — whole platoons for example — yet which their own soldiers will be immune to.”

  The threat of bio-weapons had been looming for years, but, as with nuclear attacks, they hadn’t happened: presumably due to the fear of worldwide contagion affecting even the users of such weapons. If the Indonesians were working on immune system modifications like ours, though, that might no longer be an issue for them.

  “Well, do you think it’s possible?” Savage said. “Could you modify the immune system to counteract such an attack?”

  “Without knowing what the disease is, it will be hard to say,” I said.

  The military officers and the Prime Minister all looked at one another. “Well, we do have some initial samples that our intel
ligence agents were able to recover,” Susan said.

  Klaus, Anthony and I all looked at one another. For the first time in months I felt solidarity with Anthony. This was something that could potentially affect our entire country. A country which, despite the massive changes it had been through in the last ten years, I still loved.

  Then I wondered how true this was. How had they gotten samples of this virus? Maybe this was a virus they themselves were working on and now wanted to protect our own soldiers against.

  My mind swirled with possibilities.

  “Let’s go down to the labs,” Savage said.

  Two floors down from the offices were five floors of laboratories. On the first of these we were introduced to Dr Kate Darlinghurst, head scientist on the project. Kate was a tall, shapely woman in her early forties, with thick, brown hair that was clipped at the sides but fell almost halfway down her back. Her nose was straight, her chin firm, and her eyes deep with intelligence.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Michael.” She shook my hand much more warmly than those of Anthony or Klaus. She even seemed to be more impressed by my presence than by that of the Prime Minister, and we rapidly fell into conversation together. Apparently she had been following the articles I had written for various genetics journals with interest, including the most recent one on the link between bonobo immune system genes and their social behavior.

  General Savage led us along the corridor, and we went into another meeting room and sat down.

  “What we’re dealing with is a modified strain of the Ebola virus,” Kate said. “It’s airborne, has an incubation period of less than twenty-four hours, and a ninety-five percent mortality rate.”

  My whole body cramped up on me. I had read about the possibility of Ebola becoming airborne, but doubted anyone would ever risk it. A virus like that would wipe out most of the world’s population in a matter of weeks.

  “If you’ll just switch your public overlays on, I’ll show you some footage,” Kate said.

  With a subvocal command I switched to my public overlay and a grainy video of four people in a glass room appeared appeared before my eyes. I darkened the background.

  “This video footage was captured at the same time we managed to get hold of a sample of the virus. Here we have four subjects, who all appear to be in perfect physical condition. In just a moment we’re about to see another subject introduced into the room, one who has been infected with what we’ve decided to call Rebola.”

  A door opened at the back of the glass room and another person, a small, emaciated man, was brought in by two people in haz-mat suits. They kept him there for a short while and then led him out again.

  “Within less than five minutes of sharing a confined space with an infected individual all other individuals will be infected,” Kate said.

  I jolted backwards in an instinctual reaction of fear, even though what I was seeing was only a video.

  “This is a day later,” Kate continued.

  The video timestamp changed and we saw the same group of people experiencing extreme respiratory distress and hemorrhaging from their mouths and noses.

  I imagined the horror of dying like that. I was almost thankful that Annie had HIV-4, which was benign compared to this. At least it had given her time.

  “And someone came up with this?” I said.

  “Sick fucks, aren’t they?” General Savage swore, then turned to Kate and the Prime Minister. “My apologies.”

  “No apology needed, General,” the Prime Minister said. “Well, what do you think, Michael? Do you think your modified immune system would be able to handle this?”

  “It all depends on the mechanism.” I turned to Kate. “What kind of antigens does it produce? How does it escape the antibodies at the moment.”

  “Similar to the Ebola virus — it’s the speed at which it works. But there are also a few notable differences,” Kate said, and ran me through a fairly lengthy explanation.

  When she’d finished I turned to the Prime Minister. “In answer to your question, Susan, we’re really not going to know until we try. And we can’t try until we’ve developed a reliable method of somatically modifying the immune system.”

  “Okay, let’s get to work then.”

  After a tour of the labs we went back to the meeting room above, and two men in suits came in. Klaus and Anthony started some preliminary negotiations.

  “Are we going to be able to continue working from our current labs?” I asked. “I doubt anybody will be that happy about moving out here to the middle of nowhere.”

  “You’d be surprised how comfortable our facilities here are,” General Savage replied. “I don’t know, Bill, what do you think?” He turned to one of the men in suits.

  “It seems some of the initial work could be performed in the current Geneus facilities; the work involving bringing the modifications to fruition. Once that’s been done, the actual viral testing itself will have to be done here on-site. Of course, security in your lab is going to need to be completely overhauled. No doubt you have reasonable security already, but this is the military, gentlemen.”

  “Of course,” Klaus agreed. “Whatever’s necessary.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THAT NIGHT, I returned home to Annie.

  “How’d it go?” she said.

  I shook my head and told her about the virus I’d witnessed, and how the military claimed the Indonesians were planning on using it.

  “Do you think it’s true?” Annie said.

  “I have no idea. If governments are going to resort to bio-warfare then that’s the end of all of us. Even if we come up with a somatic modification for this virus there are always going to be more.”

  “At least the rest of the eco-system might have a chance to recover.” Annie smiled cynically and took hold of my hand.

  “You’re right. It might not be the worst thing in the world.”

  “Maybe we should just go away.”

  We’d talked about this possibility before. I’d done some research over the past few months and it seemed there were a number of companies who specialized in anonymous transfers to completely self-sufficient floating sovereignties like the cruise ship we’d just spent some time on. For the right price, you could disappear forever.

  I tried to imagine the type of people you’d meet in a place like that: a combination of CEOs and entrepreneurs fleeing taxation and criminals fleeing the authorities. What would it be like to drink vodka with some tattooed Russian mafioso for the rest of my life? Probably alright, if the facilities were anything like the ones on that cruise ship. And with Annie by my side, at least for a few more years, it might not be the worst way to end things.

  “If we go away then there’s no chance we’ll ever find a cure for your disease,” I said.

  “I don’t know if you’re going to find one now, anyway. At least we’d get to spend some time together. If you take this contract I’m never going to see you.”

  She was right. The contract would require me to spend months if not years at the military lab.

  “Come with me,” I said.

  “What about my work here?”

  “You could give up your work. You should be taking it easy anyway.”

  “I don’t want to give up my work. If I’m going to stay here, and I’m going to die, I want to make sure my life means something to someone other than myself.”

  “Maybe I could find some work for you with the military.”

  “Maybe,” she said, but I could see she didn’t want to. And to be honest, even if she was there, I’d still hardly see her. This project was going to require the undivided attention of all my waking hours.

  “Let’s think about it, then. We’ve still got time.”

  The next day, Annie came home from her clinic very distressed.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “Sam’s sick. Rabies. And we don’t have any vaccines. I don’t know what to do. Although it’s probably too late to do anythi
ng now anyway.”

  Sam was the son of a man called William, who had once lived in the de-reg zone and saved Annie’s life, but lost his own in doing so. Annie had been leaving the clinic just behind William, who was there with his elderly mother. A car had pulled up out the front and two men with machine guns had gotten out. There was another man, ahead of Annie, who had just been sewn up for gunshot wounds, and the men in the car had obviously wanted to finish him off. William had turned around and pushed both his mother and Annie back inside the clinic. Four machine gun pellets had caught him in the back, though, and he’d died within minutes.

  “I can synthesize the antibodies in the lab if you like, and see if we can help him,” I said.

  “Anything,” Annie said. “I owe my life to these people.”

  At William’s funeral we’d met Gilda, his widow, and had been supporting her and Sam financially ever since, but I knew Annie still felt a great debt to them.

  The next day, I explained the situation to Klaus and asked him if I could use the labs. Klaus was so happy about the military contract that he said yes right away.

  That evening, Annie and I sat side by side in our car as it transported us to the de-reg zone.

  I had only been to the clinic there once before and had forgotten how depressing it was. There was almost no money for a clinic like this except for occasional donations from aid organizations, and when we arrived the small, crowded waiting room was full of patients who really should have been in a proper hospital.

  The boy, Sam, was led into Annie’s tiny consultation room by his mother, Gilda, who looked desperate. She helped him up onto the bed, and Annie explained to her what we were going to do.

  “What will happen if it doesn’t work?” Gilda begged. “Will he die?”

  “Yes, he probably will,” Annie said.

  Gilda put her hands up to her mouth. “What are the chances of it working?”

  “We really don’t know. It’s been a while since he was bitten. Maybe if we’d gotten to him earlier, but now it’s hard to tell.”