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

by Thomas Norwood

  Once our modified cells had continued to reproduce, we ran tests on them to check for the integration of the new genes. Beatrice and Richard then removed the nucleuses of our remaining egg cells, allowing us to insert our stem cells into them: modified for some and un-modified for others. From these two groups, twins would be born — one child modified and the other not.

  Each morning, after the women had been impregnated, I did the rounds with Yolanda, Beatrice and the nurses to check on them.

  Out of all of the mothers my favorite was the woman called Mabel who we’d interviewed first. She had a smile so wide and quick that almost anything could set it off.

  One day, Mabel grabbed my hand and put it against her stomach. “Do you think my babies are growing yet?” she said. Her bright eyes stared up at me.

  “All the tests look positive,” I said.

  “My babies are going to be just like Jesus,” she said.

  “Why’s that?” I looked at Beatrice for a hint but she was checking Mabel’s charts. I thought maybe Mabel was referring to the modifications we’d done which were going to not only make the children resistant to disease but more cooperative and empathetic as well.

  “A virgin birth,” Mabel said, upset that I hadn’t seen and realized the importance of this. “Except there’ll be lots of them. And they’ll bring much happiness to the world, like Jesus did.”

  “Yes,” I said. “They will.”

  Then, on another day, Mabel looked up at me imploringly. “I’m going to be alright, aren’t I, doctor?”

  “You’re going to be fine,” I said.

  “Do you promise? Because they made me sign all these forms…”

  “I promise.” I put my hand on her arm.

  “Thank you.”

  Yolanda and I were working in the lab one day when my com beeped.

  “You’ll have to excuse me for a moment,” I said.

  Yolanda nodded without looking up. I walked outside into the corridor.

  It was Annie.

  “Why haven’t you called me?” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t heard from you in two days.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve been busy.”

  “You’ve forgotten about me already, haven’t you?” she said, half jokingly and half seriously.

  “Of course not. We’ve just been flat out. Is everything okay?”

  “Pretty much the same.” She tried to sound upbeat but I could detect her underlying depression. Despite the new medication she’d been on, Annie’s sickness had gotten progressively worse. Doctor Baxter had told her she probably had less than a year to live.

  “Don’t give up hope. Please. I’m trying to do all I can for you. If these modifications work, and these children survive, then I’m sure we are going to be able to use them.”

  “You’ve been saying the same thing for years, Michael. Maybe you should just come home. Let’s go away, like we’ve always said we would. Spend my last year together.”

  “I don’t want to spend the next year with you. I want to spend the next fifty years with you.”

  “I really can’t see that happening.”

  “Well, I can. Please. Trust me.”

  One Saturday night, all of the adults in the compound, except for the new mothers, got drunk together around a bonfire, and as I looked at each of them in the firelight, smelling the smoke and the warm desert night, I finally felt that what we were doing was right, that this was something that generations of humans from this moment on would be thankful for.

  At the end of the night, there were just six of us left: Justin, Masanori, Beatrice, Yolanda, Richard, and I.

  “What if it works?” I suddenly pondered the very real possibility.

  “What do you mean, what if it works?” Richard said. “We’ll help humanity and all become exceedingly rich in the process. What more do you want?”

  “Will we, though? Won’t we just be helping rich people? Geneus is never going to make this freely or even cheaply available. They’ve spent too much money on it.”

  “Well, at the very least,” Justin said, “if our cooperation modifications work, then we’ll be creating nicer rich people.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  AFTER A FEW weeks, Annie came to join me at the lab, and she settled into life at the clinic easily. Despite the fact that she was tired a lot of the time, she was able to help monitor the mothers-to-be, and now that everything was progressing according to plan there actually wasn’t that much to do.

  Each evening, Annie and I would take a walk out into the desert, watching as the sun went down across the red, green and gray plain, admiring how the desert floor and plants seemed to hold within them a gentle glow even after the sun had gone.

  Often, after dinner, the staff and the expectant mothers would get together in the lounge and watch movies, read books, play games or chat. Mabel and a few others became friends, and we’d frequently sit with them at mealtimes and play rounds of cards afterwards. Although Mabel hadn’t had much of an education, she had a street shrewdness and an amazing memory that helped her win almost every card game she played.

  “So, what do you think you’ll do once all of this is over?” Annie asked Mabel one night as we were playing a game of bridge.

  “I think I’ll take my children and my parents and go and live by the beach somewhere. I’d like to run my own little business, maybe a bed and breakfast. Something that allows me to work from home. How about you two? What are your plans for the future?”

  Annie and I looked at each other, and Annie took my hand.

  “We might do just the same,” Annie said, smiling at me.

  Very early one morning I got a call from Yolanda.

  “Michael, come quickly.” Her voice was full of fear.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s the mothers. Some of them are sick.”

  I dressed quickly, without waking Annie, and ran to meet Yolanda and Masanori at the nurses’ station.

  “How many are sick?” Masanori said.

  “Four so far,” Yolanda said.

  “And the other sixteen?”

  “They seem fine.”

  Yolanda and I shared a glance of mutual fear and then she led us down a passage to one of the rooms. My heart almost stopped. It was Mabel’s room, and inside Mabel was lying down with monitors by her side and electrodes attached to her skin. Beatrice was putting a drip in her arm. Mabel’s face looked thin and exhausted and her eyes were shut. The room smelled of sweat and disinfectant.

  “Mabel’s doing the worst so far,” Beatrice said. “We’ve just run the first set of tests on her.”

  I remembered back to how Mabel had looked just a few days earlier, when we’d played a game of cards with her: relaxed and smiling.

  “What do they show” I said.

  “She’s showing every sign of being under attack but there’s no obvious cause. We thought it was pre-eclampsia to begin with, but it’s gone beyond that. The symptoms are similar to auto-immune diseases, but all the mothers test negative for those as well.”

  “Maybe the fetuses’ immune systems are attacking them,” I said. “Or the mother’s immune systems have rejected them, and have attacked them. Or a combination of both.”

  “The syncoblasts could be failing,” Masanori said, referring to the cells in the placenta responsible for regulating the flow of nutrients between the mothers and the fetuses and for stopping their immune systems reacting to one another.

  “That could certainly make sense,” Beatrice said. “Fetal immune systems aren’t designed to attack anything, though. In the developmental stage they’re designed to accept foreign cells, or they’d end up attacking their own organs.”

  “Maybe if the mothers’ immune systems are attacking them, they’ve gone into a different mode of operation,” I said.

  “That’s possible I suppose. The question is — what to do about it?”

  As much as I wanted this project to
work, as it was my last chance to save Annie, I could not have the death of any more people on my hands. “I think the first step should be to induce abortion as soon as possible. The mothers should be our first priority.”

  “We can’t do that,” Masanori said. “We promised Klaus we’d make this work. This is our last chance.”

  “There’s absolutely no point in it working if they kill their mothers in the process,” I said.

  “We have to contact Klaus and tell him what is happening,” Beatrice said.

  We put a conference call through to Klaus’s com.

  “Yes.” His voice came on the line after a long wait.

  We explained the situation to him.

  “You can’t let this project fail. You know that, don’t you?”

  “We understand, but these women are going to die,” I said.

  “They knew that was going to be a risk. They agreed to it in their contracts.”

  “What do you want us to do?” Masanori said.

  “Do whatever the fuck you can to make this work.”

  When I went back to my room that night, after spending the whole day running tests on the sick women, I felt nauseous. Since that morning, two more women had gotten sick, so now there were a total of six mothers and twelve babies at risk.

  Annie, who had been helping run tests as well, spent that night with me going over the results. Maybe the only way to successfully bring to term a fetus which had been modified as much as these had was to have a mother who had been equally modified. Maybe there was no way for an ordinary human mother to give birth to one of these children. It was like trying to get a chimpanzee to give birth to a human child. Neither their reproductive systems nor their immune systems were ready for it. We’d skipped a couple of hundred thousand years of evolution.

  The only way to do it might be to somatically modify the mothers. If we could find out why the syncoblasts were failing, and somatically modify them, then we might be able to stop the internal battle that was raging inside them. That was going to take time, though. Time that the women lying in that clinic didn’t have.

  The next morning, I hurried over to the lab. The weather outside was overcast and windy, and I looked across at the desert surrounding the lab and felt an overwhelming sense of futility and fear for the future of this planet and its inhabitants.

  I tried to remind myself what this project meant to me. How I wanted to change humanity. How humans were a group of egotistic tyrants, greedy monsters who would do anything for their own personal gain, while at the same time justifying themselves and even convincing themselves they were good people. Just like I did. I tried to summon up all my dislike of humanity and apply it to the women who were dying in the clinic so that I could feel numb to the pain of their imminent deaths, but what worked on an impersonal level couldn’t be put into practice when faced with a dying pregnant woman. Especially not Mabel.

  As I walked into the cool, white space of the lab, an environment I knew so well and felt so comfortable in, my mind and tumultuous emotions settled and I felt focussed and in control. Laboratories were as welcoming to me as my own home. In fact, they were my home in many ways — I’d probably spent more hours in them than I had at home. There was something refreshingly impersonal about them, something so separated from the everyday mess of humanity that I felt elevated to another plane by them.

  Everyone was working overtime trying to find out exactly what the problem was. In the meantime, we were trying to keep the sick women alive as long as possible, at least until we could safely extract their children and have some hope of them surviving. The most premature baby to ever survive was eighteen weeks old, and these babies were sixteen, so it was only a matter of a few weeks.

  “What about if we disarm both their immune systems?” I suggested. “How about those new mRNA decay drugs, developed for auto-immune diseases?”

  “It might work,” Beatrice said. “At the very least it will buy us some time.”

  “We can’t do that,” Masanori said.

  “Why not?”

  “It’ll interfere with our testing. We have to find out what’s causing this, or we’ll never be able to fix it. Besides, who’s going to accept a modification that requires the mothers to go on immuno-suppressants?”

  Over the next twenty-four hours, we were eventually able to find the cause of the problem. The receptors that usually responded to proteins produced by the placenta to down-regulate the immune response by the mothers were not doing their job properly due to the high levels of modification in the fetuses’ DNA. This had launched an attack on the part of the mothers’ immune systems and a counter-attack by the fetuses. We thought the fetuses themselves might be affected, but it seemed that in all but two of the cases they were in fact winning the battle, and it was the mothers only who were suffering.

  Based on the tests we’d run, we decided the best way to tackle the problem was to use a somatic therapy application that would modify the mothers’ immune systems and stop them from attacking the fetuses. This would stop the cytotoxic t-cell reaction from the fetuses, and both sides would call a cease-fire. But it was going to take weeks if not months.

  Masanori and I had a conference call with Klaus and explained the situation to him.

  “We have to make this work,” Klaus said. “That is our priority. Start the somatic modification trials.”

  “If we do that the women will possibly die,” I said. “I think we need to either administer immuno-suppressants or abort. Either way, the decision should lie with the mothers.”

  “We can’t afford to start a whole new round of trials. I agree with Masanori — people will never accept having to go on immuno-suppressants, but if we can find a somatic modification they might accept that. Especially if it helps them in other ways. We might be able to throw in a few extras for them, like improving their own immune systems. If the immuno-suppressants interfere with the testing then we can’t do it. I’m sorry, Michael. Find out what the problem is and fix it. If you can’t get it working this time, the project is over.”

  After the meeting, I went into the room where Mabel was lying on the bed with a battery of medical equipment hooked up to her. Her round stomach protruded under the sheet like a tumor, slowly killing her.

  “Doctor?” she said to me, her voice woozy. “Have you got a cure for me yet?”

  “Not yet. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m okay, I suppose. I don’t want to lose my babies, but I don’t want to die.”

  “I know. I understand.” I took her hand. “We might have to make a choice, though.”

  “What choice is that?”

  “We might have to abort your babies in order to save you.”

  “No, please,” she said, clasping her stomach. “Isn’t there something you can do to save them?”

  “There is, but it’s riskier.”

  “How much riskier?”

  “We really don’t know.” I was optimistic it would work, but I didn’t want to give her false hope.

  She looked at me for a minute, then looked down at her belly, rubbing it gently. “I’m prepared to take the risk,” she said.

  “Please don’t mention this to anyone else.”

  “Why not?”

  “They are prepared to let your babies die.” I didn’t want to tell her the whole truth — that they were prepared to let her die.

  “I won’t. How are the others?”

  “They’re okay.”

  “If I do die, my family will get the money, won’t they?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “That’s okay, then.”

  I went out of Mabel’s room, and into the rooms of all the other mothers and asked them the same question. All the mothers said they were willing to risk their lives to save their babies.

  I went up the stairs of the clinic and out onto the rooftop. The sky was dark and moonless and a whole universe of stars shone down upon me, gleaming like tiny diamonds in the black rock of a cave. If I was
going to do something, I had to do it soon.

  I stood at the edge of the concrete parapet and looked down to the paving below. For a moment I imagined myself falling through the air, crashing into the ground. The feeling of relief was immense.

  I sent a message to Annie, who was doing the rounds of the sick women, and asked her to meet me.

  Ten minutes later, she came up the stairs.

  “What is it, Michael?”

  “We have two options. We can force the mothers to miscarry, which will protect them, given it’s the fetuses which are causing the problem, or we can try to administer immuno-suppressants that will potentially save them both. All of the mothers have said they’d prefer to try the immuno-suppressants. Either option will probably get me fired and maybe arrested. ”

  “What do you think the chances of them working are?”

  “I think they’re pretty good, as long as we can do it soon.”

  “Let’s do it then. I’ll help you.”

  “Okay, but I think it’s better if you’re not involved.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re sick. We need to cure you. This is our last chance, and if we’re both arrested that’ll never happen.”

  She took my hands and we squeezed one another tightly.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  AT 2AM, THE immuno-suppressant drugs I’d ordered arrived by helicopter. I met the courier a kilometer away from the clinic so that nobody would hear the helicopter landing. By now all of the women were sick, so I was going to have to administer the drugs to all of them.

  After driving back to the clinic, I hid the drugs in a storeroom and went into the lab where Masanori, Yolanda, Justin, Beatrice and Richard were working, along with the rest of the team.

  “Where have you been?” Richard asked me.

  “Getting some rest. Why don’t you all go and do the same? Justin and I can handle it from here, and the rest of you can take over from us at seven.”