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

by Thomas Norwood

  “I’ll look into it,” he promised. “But how are we going to test them once we’ve created them?”

  “Annie said she’d do it,” I said and took my next turn.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  OVER THE NEXT few months, we worked hard at adapting our immune system modifications to interrupt the effects of Rebola, and finally we came up with what all our testing promised to be a solution.

  Up until now we’d been using SCID-hu mice: mice whose entire immune systems had been deleted and replaced with human tissue from aborted fetuses. Their immune responses were as close to human as we could get. By somatically modifying them, we’d given them an immune system that was capable of recognizing and eradicating the Rebola virus within hours, before any serious damage was done.

  To prevent any complications when we started applying the modifications to humans, we coded in a chemical failsafe inducer which would reverse the changes to any modified cells if necessary.

  Even still, the night before we were supposed to test our first group of human subjects, I felt worried. Kate had assured me there was no way we would actually have to infect the subjects with the Rebola virus itself, but this was the first time in history that such a large-scale modification to the human genome had been attempted.

  Memories of everything I’d ever read about the Nazis’ Action T4 and their eugenics programs came back to me, and I wondered if I wasn’t somehow caught up in something similar. I had wanted to use my knowledge and skills to help people, to improve the human race — how had I ended up working for the military?

  On a number of occasions I’d wanted to leave but had decided that staying was probably the best thing I could do. If Rebola really was going to be unleashed against our citizens then I needed to help. Without protection, we’d be wiped out faster than our aboriginal population had been by smallpox. And in case the military was lying, and they were creating this modification for their own purposes, then being on the inside would be better than being a lonely voice of opposition on the outside.

  The morning of the first tests I woke up at 5am, sweating. I wondered if I’d contracted a virus, but the labs and staff were so ruthlessly clean it was unlikely.

  I went down to the lab at seven. Kate and Masanori were already there, along with a number of younger members of the team, and soon after, Justin, Yolanda and Richard all arrived.

  “Does anyone know yet who we are going to be working with?” Yolanda asked.

  “No idea.” Kate shook her head in a way that made me think she didn’t really care.

  “I just hope there are no adverse effects,” Justin said. “And that if there are then our failsafe inducer works fast enough to stop them.”

  At 9am, Savage came into the lab and told us we were going to be working with maximum security prisoners who had been convicted of terrorism. Half an hour later, the first of these was led into a small consulting room just off the laboratory by two soldiers. His skin was pale but his eyes and hair were dark, just like mine, and I immediately recognized him as having middle-eastern origins.

  The man looked at me, fixating on my eyes for a moment, no doubt recognizing in me a blood relation. His gaze was intense, but I realized it was more pleading than threatening. I couldn’t hold his stare and turned away to the bench where the syringes containing the bio-vectors were lined up. Not too soon, I hoped. I didn’t want to frighten him in a way that I knew would make him crazy. I’d seen it in the chimps before — screaming and struggling, needing to be held down and sedated. It made everyone’s lives worse, including their own.

  “What are you going to do to me?” the man asked in an English so thick I could only just understand.

  “It’s a trial, a medical trial,” Savage said slowly to the man. “Nothing to worry about.”

  The man was lowered down into the chair in the middle of the room, six of us surrounding him. He said something in Arabic that I caught only a snippet of: a prayer. Kate came over to the bench, took the first syringe, then pulled the man’s shirt sleeves up and quickly injected him with the viral vector that would hopefully modify his immune system enough to make him resistant to Rebola.

  “There you go, all done.” Kate smiled and patted him on the back.

  The man was helped up from the chair and glanced one last time in my direction before he was taken from the room.

  Another ten prisoners were brought in, and we repeated the process with all of them.

  It would be two weeks before we could see the full effects of our modifications, and during that time we kept a careful watch on our test subjects, taking blood samples and testing them for genomic DNA modifications and hematopoietic stem cell potential.

  We had to spend a bit of time with the men, and I got to know them individually. Ghanim was the man we’d injected first, the arab who had looked at me strangely, and once, when we were alone together, I asked him about his life.

  He was a soldier in the army, he told me, and he had volunteered for the duty of self-sacrifice. He had come to Australia to take part in an attack on Sydney, a series of suicide bombs that would have taken out Government house.

  “What are they doing to me?” he asked, hoarsely, as if he didn’t really want to know the answer.

  I shook my head. “It’s a trial. On your immune system.”

  “Will it make me sick?”

  “No. Hopefully it will make you stronger. Do you have family?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your family name?”

  “Al-Saadi. And yours? Are you Arab?”

  “My father was. Khan is my name. Where are you from?”

  “Iraq. A town called Karam Kadal. Very small.” He smiled, obviously remembering his home town.

  “Wife? Children?”

  He shook his head. “Just two brothers. My parents died. I have to look after them.”

  I wanted to reach out and touch him, put a hand on his shoulder and give him a display of human affection, but I couldn’t bring myself to.

  “As-salam alaykum,” I said to him as I left, the only Arabic I could remember, which meant something along the lines of: “peace be upon you.”

  By the third week, we started to notice some fairly significant changes in the hematopoietic stem cells being produced in the bone marrow of our test subjects. At around the same time, a couple of them got sick with something similar to an auto-immune disease. We immediately activated the failsafe inducer, and within twelve hours the negative effects had abated.

  That night, I went to Justin’s room after receiving a message from him. I sat down in the armchair while he sat on the edge of the bed.

  “I’ve found a way to hack into HAL,” he said.

  “So can we make the modifications?”

  “Yes. But I think we should test it first. You saw what happened to those men this week.” He was referring to the auto-immune reaction our prisoners had had.

  “We’re so much further along with this, though. We’ve been working on it for years.”

  “Not on humans, we haven’t.”

  “How long has Penny got?”

  “Probably a month or two, at the most.”

  “Then we have to try it. We can use the same chemical trigger we’ve just used to switch it off in case it doesn’t work.”

  “How do we get it out of here?”

  “I’ve got a break coming up in a fortnight. I’ll take it out then. We can mix the powdered form of the virus with some self-sealing polymers they’ve got over in lab five. I saw Yolanda using them the other day.”

  Just before my trip back home, I got a message from Justin.

  “All ready?” I said as I entered his room.

  “Yes, all here.” He held up a pill-sized bubble — the virus in its protective coating. If we’d had the right equipment we could have created a pill whose coating would dissolve upon contact with stomach acid, releasing the bio-vector, but as it was I would have to dissolve and inject Annie with it.

  “Are yo
u sure about this?” Justin said.

  “Not really. Are you?”

  “Not really.”

  “I won’t blame you if it doesn’t work, and I don’t want you to blame yourself, either.”

  “I won’t be able to help it. Of course I’ll feel responsible.”

  “It’s the only way and you know it. Think about not only Annie and Penny but all the other people out there living with this disease as well.”

  I wasn’t any more confident about this than Justin was, but I was his boss and I had to keep up a show of strength for him. Penny was much closer to the end than Annie was.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I ARRIVED BACK in Melbourne at 9:15am on a Thursday morning. It was August, but it was already hot. I walked out of the terminal after collecting my bags and the sun bore into my skin. A car was waiting for me. Despite the heat, all I could think about was how much I wanted to see Annie and how much I hoped our somatic therapy modification was going to cure her.

  Sitting in the back of the car on the way into the city, I thought back to our honeymoon, twenty years ago, in Italy and France, before the flooding, traveling around the countryside in a rental car, stopping in villages where we would make love in the afternoons before going out ravenous for drinks and meals in the evenings.

  I remembered when we’d gone to look at the first house we owned together. It had seemed very expensive at the time, but we’d both fallen in love with it. We borrowed money from Annie’s mother for the deposit and on the day of settlement we ate Chinese take-away on the floor and slept on a camp mattress in the main bedroom. It was one of the best moments of our life.

  The car stopped at the Geneus laboratory. Almost everyone had left so extracting the viral-vector from its protective coating wasn’t going to be too difficult. Under a biological hood, I depolymerized it, neutralized the base, and ran it through a syringe filter to sterilize it. I sucked the final solution up into a sterile needle and covered it, ready for application.

  Just as I was leaving, I went down to the monkey lab to look in on our macaques. I’d been missing them.

  Vanessa, one of our lab workers, was there. She looked upset.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “They’re going to terminate them.” She nodded towards the monkey cages.

  “What do you mean? They’re supposed to be retired.”

  “Not any more. Apparently it’s too costly. They’ve decided to euthanize them.”

  “When?”

  “Saturday morning.”

  “What? Why wasn’t I told about this?”

  “I have no idea. Anthony just told me this afternoon. Is there something we can do?” Vanessa held her hands out like a school girl.

  “I don’t know. Who’s going to be doing it?”

  “I have to. I’m supposed to inject them and take them down to the city crematorium.”

  I went across to the cages and pushed some grapes through for Sika and Toby, my favorites. They squawked happily.

  “I’ll see if there’s something we can do and call you. If I can find somewhere for them, will you help me get them out of here? I doubt Anthony will be too pleased with me undermining his authority.”

  “Of course.”

  When I arrived home, Annie was preparing a meal. I went over to her and we hugged for a long time. We had been in constant contact since I left, so in some ways it seemed like we hadn’t been apart. Hugging her, though, was something my body had been craving for weeks.

  “I’ve made your favorite. Farmed barramundi with fried rice and vegetables.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Glass of wine?”

  “Please.”

  Annie stood in front of me and ran her fingers through my hair.

  “You really have aged so much more gracefully than I have. Look at all this hair. It’s getting a little long, though, don’t you think? Maybe I should cut it for you, like I used to.”

  “I like it long.”

  “You’re not going to become a hippy in your old age, are you?”

  “Maybe.” I smiled. The feeling of Annie’s hands on my skull was calming and I closed my eyes for a second.

  I wondered how I could ever live without her. We had loved each other and been best friends for over twenty years. She had been my companion in everything. We had made it through the poorest and the hardest times in our lives and come through them together, changed and hardened, but still hopeful.

  She poured some red wine and handed a glass to me and removed the tray of fish from the oven. We sat down and I ate my fish slowly, savoring each mouthful as if this were the last meal I’d ever enjoy with my wife. This life, this togetherness which I’d always nurtured, this feeling of safety and warmth and love, was too much to lose. We’d never had children but we’d always had each other, and Annie was everything to me.

  After dinner we slipped back onto the lounge. I put some Japanese flute music on the stereo and the gentle sound went whispering into the house. It was mournful but joyful also, the notes starting low then building and rising in yearning, then falling and rising again.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” I said.

  “What’s that?” She looked concerned.

  “We managed to create a bio-vector containing our somatic immune system modification.”

  “Really?” She stared at me.

  “Yes. I’ve got the solution here. We just need to find someone to test it on. Is there someone at your clinic who’s got HIV-4 and is close to dying?”

  “I told you before. I want you to test it on me.”

  “I think we should find someone else. What if something goes wrong?”

  “Then it should be me.”

  “I have to return to the lab next week. I’m not going to be here to monitor you.”

  “How much have you got?”

  “Just enough for one person. It wasn’t easy to get out of the lab.”

  “What form is it in? Liquid?”

  “Yes. I depolymerized it at Geneus and put it into a syringe. It’s in my briefcase.”

  “Give it to me, then.”

  “No. Let’s think about it for a day.”

  “I don’t want to think about it. I’m ready.”

  “We’ve got another problem.” I wanted to distract her and give myself time to prepare for this. I told her about the monkeys.

  “Is there anywhere we can put them?” she said.

  “I don’t know. I suppose we could release them into the wild. But I don’t even know where. In the de-reg zone they’d probably get eaten. I thought about asking Dylan. Maybe they’d allow us to put them on one of the islands.”

  “Let’s invite him and Sophie around for dinner tomorrow,” Annie said, then she pushed up close to me.

  An hour later I took a shower, and when I came out I found Annie sitting on our bed with my briefcase open and the syringe next to her — empty.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It was the only way, Michael. You know it and I know it. There wasn’t any point arguing about it.” Her voice was perfectly calm, and I sat down next to her on the bed and put my face in my hands. Annie put her hand on my back.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m okay.”

  It would be days before the bio-vectors started having any effect on Annie, and weeks before we knew if they’d been successful or not.

  The following evening, Dylan and Sophie came over for dinner. I told them about how the monkeys were going to be terminated and asked them if they knew where we could take them.

  “I thought they weren’t allowed to terminate them,” Dylan said.

  “The regulations have changed,” I replied. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Is there any way you can get them out of there?”

  “Yes. Vanessa’s supposed to put them down and then take them to a local crematorium. She could just sedate them instead.”

  “Well, we could take them out to one of the islands. Th
ey could live in the forest there. They will survive in the wild, won’t they?”

  “They should be okay. Don’t you think the people there might be upset, though?”

  “I’m sure we can work something out. The kids would love them. And besides, if they ever get hungry they can always eat them.” He smiled.

  “Dylan,” Sophie said, hitting him.

  The next morning, Dylan and I drove into the car park of the Geneus lab and helped Vanessa load fifteen supposedly dead macaques into the back of our car.

  “What are you going to take to the crematorium instead?” Dylan asked her.

  “Rabbits,” Vanessa replied. She’d been down to the market that morning and purchased fifteen dead rabbits, whose body mass wasn’t that different from our macaques.

  Dylan and I drove out to the airport and we put each of the macaques, still sedated, into cages that Annie and Sophie had picked up for us. We loaded them all into the back of the Cessna.

  “Where’s the pilot?” I said.

  “You’re looking at him,” Dylan replied.

  “You’re flying?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m not trusting the lives of these monkeys to you.”

  “It’s either me or Sophie, and I can tell you who I’d choose,” Dylan said, and we laughed.

  Once we were on board, Dylan maneuvered the plane easily out to the beginning of the runway, and in just a few minutes, we were floating up over the city. I looked down to where the green grass ended and the shanty towns of the de-reg zone started. We were low enough that I could see the clusters of army vehicles and tents about five kilometers from the fence line.

  There had been news in the last few weeks of melees between the government forces and the rebels who were trying to penetrate the regulated zone. If the rebels managed to get through, a full scale attack on the city itself was possible.