“We’ll see you at six-thirty,” Masanori said.
I knew that when Masanori said six-thirty, he would be there not a second earlier or later.
Justin was just as worried about the mothers as I was, and I explained to him what I was going to do, knowing I could trust him.
“You’re crazy. Klaus will have you charged.”
“That’s a risk I’m willing to take. I can’t be responsible for any more deaths.”
“Let’s get to work then,” he said.
“No. You have to let me do this. I can’t have you implicated.”
“I don’t care. Let me help you.”
“No. If they put me in prison or fire me I might need you.”
“What for?”
I explained to him how I hoped to be able to use the babies’ blood samples, once they were born, to clone out genes for useful antibodies and culture natural killer cells to cure HIV-4.
“Okay Michael. Just be careful. Promise me.” He put his hands on my shoulders, and I felt for the first time that our roles had been reversed: that now he was protecting me.
“I will.”
The drugs couldn’t be administered directly or the patients risked going into anaphylactic shock. There was a range of other drugs that needed to be given first, and I went about hooking them up to their IV lines.
I wondered whether or not to try to inject some of the immuno-suppressant drugs straight into the fetuses, but decided that it would be too much of a shock for them and that they’d be better receiving a smaller dose through the umbilical cord.
Once the first round of drugs had been set up, I asked Justin to keep an eye on the mothers and went back to the storeroom. From the fridge I took the vials of immuno-suppressants and set them out on the bench top. I took twenty syringes from the cupboard, carefully drawing one milliliter of the drug concoction into each of them. My heart was thumping, and every few seconds I thought I heard something and stared around me, but it was nothing. Just the wind outside which had started whipping across the dry plain of the desert, tearing at the leaves of the eucalypts in the compound. I slipped the syringes into the pockets of my lab coat.
By the time I was ready it was nearly six.
“Are you alright?” Justin said. “You look a little pale.”
“Yeah, I’m fine. How are the mothers?”
“They’re okay. None of them seem to have gotten any worse, at least.”
“That’s a relief. Why don’t you go and get some rest? I’ll wait for the others. They’ll be here soon.”
“Let me help you. You haven’t got much time left.”
“No. Please, Justin. You can’t.”
“Okay,” he said. “Wake me when you need me.”
“I will.”
I waited until Justin pattered off down the corridor and then I went over to the station where Christina, one of the nurses, was entering some information into her com.
“How are they going?” I said.
“They seem okay.” She looked up at me.
“You can probably cut the rounds back to every hour. Give them a chance to rest.”
“I’ll let Tania know.”
“Where is Tania?”
“I think she’s down with Mabel.”
I walked down to Mabel’s room. Tania was taking her blood pressure.
“How’s it looking?” I said.
“No higher than it has been.”
“Good. How are you feeling, Mabel?”
“I just want to sleep,” she said.
“I know, I know.”
I waited until Tania had gone out of the room and Mabel had closed her eyes again and fallen back to sleep. I took the first of the syringes out of my pocket and took the cap off the needle.
I injected the contents of the syringe into Mabel’s IV bag then slipped it back into my pocket. I stroked Mabel briefly on the head and went out to follow Tania.
Tania was just finishing up with another of the mothers, Chloe, and I pretended to look over Chloe’s chart while she did so. Once Tania had left the room, I emptied the next syringe into her IV bag and moved on.
I checked my watch. It was six-fifteen. I still had fifteen minutes. I did eleven more mothers in the same way. Just as I was onto the fourteenth one, Juliette, I heard someone coming towards me.
“Morning Michael,” Richard said, coming into the room.
“Morning,” I said.
“How’s Juliette doing?”
“She seems to be fine.”
“Would you mind coming with me?” Richard said.
My body flooded with anxiety.
“What is it?” I said, following Richard into the corridor.
“It’s Jane’s blood results. I’m a bit worried about them. What do you think?” Richard sent the results to my public overlay.
“They look okay to me.” I scanned them briefly. “I don’t think it’s anything serious.”
“You sure?”
“I’m not really sure about anything at this stage. Maybe you should get Beatrice to have a look.”
“Okay. Will do.”
Then I realized that Beatrice might order another round of bloods, and the drug I’d just administered to Jane might come up, and Beatrice would be sure to investigate.
“You know what, it’s okay. I think she’ll be fine. Beatrice has got enough on her plate.”
“Really?” Richard said.
“Yes, it’s fine. If she shows any other signs let me know. Otherwise leave it. Beatrice needs to sleep.”
By this time Masanori had arrived, so I had one more person to dodge, and I still had seven more mothers to do.
I went back into Juliette’s room but Masanori was in there.
“Everything okay?” I said, glancing up at the IV bag. It was running out.
“Yes, seems to be,” Masanori said.
I stood there.
“Are you okay?” Masanori said, looking up from Juliette’s charts.
“Yes, fine,” I said. I decided to do Samantha first, and then come back to Juliette. If I did that, though, there was a good chance Juliette’s IV bag would be finished.
I ran down the corridor, but Tania was in Samantha’s room.
I came out and saw Masanori coming out of Juliette’s room. I slipped in after him and ran over to the IV bag with my syringe at the ready and injected it into the last hundred milliliters of fluid.
Just then I heard Tania outside, and before I knew it she was in the room staring at me.
“Is everything okay?” she said.
“Yes, fine,” I said. “The bag’s almost finished. I was going to disconnect it.”
“You need to disconnect it at this end first, you know that, don’t you?” she said, reaching for the catheter going into Juliette’s arm.
“Yes, of course,” I said, my heart pounding as I watched the last of the fluid along with the drug I’d injected into it run down into Juliette’s veins just before Tania pulled the line out.
I eventually managed to do the remaining mothers, and then told Masanori that I was going to get some sleep.
I walked back to my room in a state of sleepless shock. As I rounded the concrete corner of the building and walked up a small path to the covered walkway outside the accommodation wing, nothing seemed real anymore. I opened my door, went inside and lay down on the bed next to Annie, who was asleep, and imbibed her warm smell.
“How’d you go last night?” Annie said to me when I woke up.
“Okay, I think. I’ve got to get back.”
I dressed quickly, kissed Annie on the lips, and ran over to the clinic.
“How are all the mothers going?” I asked Yolanda, who was the first person I ran into.
“They seem fine so far.”
“Do you know where Beatrice is?”
“No.”
I pinged Beatrice’s com. She was by the bedside of Juliette.
“How’s everything looking?” I said.
“They a
ctually seem a bit better this morning. By the way, Mabel asked to see you.”
“Okay.”
I walked down the corridor to Mabel’s room.
She had her eyes closed but as I came in she opened them.
“Hello Doctor,” she said.
“Hi Mabel. How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay. And my babies? Are they okay?”
“They should be.”
“I don’t want to lose my babies.” Mabel clutched at her protruding stomach.
I sat down on the side of the bed and took her hand. “I know. We’re going to do the best we can.”
Suddenly, a loud, high-pitched scream filled the clinic passageways.
“Heart rates on both babies are dropping rapidly,” Beatrice said when I ran into Juliette’s room. “We have to deliver these babies, now. Let’s get them down to the operating theatre.”
Juliette was rushed down to the theatre and wheeled in. One of the nurses hauled up Juliette’s robe and slathered her stomach with iodine. Another passed Beatrice a scalpel.
Within minutes they had sliced Juliette open, the hiss of the vacuum sucking up her blood. They removed the dying fetuses and tried to resuscitate them, intubating them and using the paddles, but it was no use, they were too small. Both of them died on the table.
I stayed in the clinic all day but thankfully none of the other fetuses were affected, and by that night almost all the mothers had improved. I couldn’t help thinking that if I had gotten to Juliette a little bit earlier, and if Tania hadn’t interrupted me, then we might have saved her babies as well.
I went back to my room exhausted. Annie was there, lying on the bed, motionless, and for a moment I thought something was wrong.
“Annie?”
She groaned but didn’t open her eyes.
“Are you okay?” I said, going over to her and putting my hand on her.
She looked up at me. “Yes, I’m fine. How did it go?”
“Juliette lost her babies.” I slumped down next to her.
“And the rest?”
“They’re all fine.”
She sat up and wrapped her arms around me.
A few days later, back in Melbourne, I took the elevator to the thirtieth floor of the Geneus building. My hands sweated. Klaus had asked me to come and see him. What was I going to tell him? When they’d done an autopsy on the dead fetuses, Beatrice had discovered the immuno-suppressants in their blood and I’d had to admit it was me. I thought back to the support Klaus had always given me, and how more than anyone he had been like a father figure to me.
I walked down the corridor to the glass door of Klaus’ corner office and tapped lightly.
“Come in,” I heard his voice.
I pushed the door open, and found Klaus with one arm flat on his desk and the other supporting his chin. I stood there with my hands behind my back.
“Sit down,” Klaus said, not offering me his hand.
I sat in the leather and stainless steel visitors chair in front of his large black desk. Behind Klaus was a view across the city. A new residential tower was going up; cranes were hauling concrete into place.
Klaus leant back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He shook his head.
“What the hell were you thinking, Michael?”
“I’m sorry. I just couldn’t let those mothers die. Too many people have died already from projects that this company has been involved in.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“No, I don’t. Enlighten me.” He sat back and put his hands out.
“You really don’t know?”
“About what?” He slapped his hands on the desk in front of him.
“What happened in the de-reg zone?”
“What do you mean? If it hadn’t been for us the Indonesians would have wiped us all out.”
“That was us. We did that. Our own government released that virus.” I stood up. How could he not know that?
Klaus looked taken aback as if he’d just been stung.
“Have you gone out of your mind, Michael? Sabotaging our project, coming up with conspiracy theories. What the fuck is wrong with you?” He stood up as well.
“Klaus, please, you have to believe me. It was all our own military. The Indonesians had nothing to do with it. General Savage admitted it to me himself.”
“They never said anything to me.”
“Of course they wouldn’t. It was classified information.”
“Why didn’t you tell someone? Me? Go to the press?”
“They threatened to have me arrested.”
“I just can’t believe this, Michael. This is outrageous. Why would they even want to do that?”
Just then I remembered the audio I’d recorded at my meeting with Savage. I had it on my com and sent it across to Klaus. “Listen to that.”
As Klaus listened he sat down slowly, dumbfounded, shaking his head. He didn’t say anything for a minute and then he said, “Michael, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“Now do you understand why I couldn’t risk those mothers lives?”
Klaus stared at me and I watched his whole face change.
“Yes. I suppose I can.”
“I had no option. I just couldn’t go through that again.”
“I’m sorry, Michael. I really am. I don’t know what’s happened to me. I don’t know what I’ve become. Trying to protect this company has made me into someone that I never wanted to be. I don’t even know why I do it any more.”
“If we can somatically modify the mothers before pregnancy, I’m sure the next round of trials will work.”
“I don’t think I can afford to keep going. I’ve spoken to Jan over at HGM and they’re not going to invest any more without taking a controlling share in the company.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Maybe I should give it all away. I simply can’t afford to invest any more money in this.” His face was starting to go red. His hands clenched up in a ball in front of him. I wasn’t sure if he wanted to hit me or cry. He slumped down onto his desk, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel sorry for him. If it hadn’t been for him and his greed we never would have gotten involved in the project with the military, and I wouldn’t still be living with the guilt and the nightmares of having been responsible for the deaths of millions of people, including people I had loved.
Over the next few months, arrangements were made, as per the original contract, for HGM industries to take over the management of the entire project.
During this time I had a meeting with Gendigm.
“How long do you think it will take?” Bruno said.
“A year at the most,” I said. “We know what the problem is now, and it won’t take long to fix.”
Four months later, thirty-eight healthy babies were born.
Annie and I went into Mabel’s room and found her lying in bed with a tiny baby on either side of her wrapped in a blanket.
“I’ve decided to call them Rhonda and Rose,” Mabel said, a smile of pure pleasure on her face. “After my mother and my grandmother.”
That night, I went across to the serology lab. Everything was dark and quiet and I switched on the lights with a feeling of trepidation. I took a sample of Annie’s blood from one of the fridges that we had tested just a few days earlier. I held it up for a moment, looking at the blood behind the glass and thinking how fragile we really were. And then I took samples of the blood that we’d taken from all of our newborn babies.
Over the next few hours, I isolated natural killer cells from the babies’ blood. I thought about extracting antibodies as well, to see if any of them would have a higher level of affinity for HIV-4 infected cells, but it would take a long time and the chances were unlikely. They had never been exposed to HIV-4.
I purified Annie’s blood sample to remove the infected T-cells and then divided it into twenty samples. Using the lab’s AutoAnaly
zer I added the enriched natural killer cells to the virally infected cells and assayed for a natural killer cell response using cytokine production.
In almost every case, the result was the same or less than Annie’s own natural killer cell response. In one case, though, there was a slightly higher level of death amongst the HIV-4 infected cells. It was only small, probably not enough to cure her, but it might just give her the boost she needed to stay alive until the next round of children was born.
I put the cells in culture, knowing that within a few weeks I’d have tens of thousands of them, and I went back to my room and lay down beside the warm body of my wife.
“Where have you been?” she said.
“Nowhere,” I replied. “Go back to sleep.” I put my arm around her and pulled her in close.
A week after that, my natural killer cell colony was ready, and I injected Annie. Within hours her viral load was down. I monitored her for days, continuing to inject her with the cultured cells. For a while I almost let myself believe that this would cure her — but all I managed to do was to reduce the severity of her illness and hopefully give her a few more years of life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
OVER THE NEXT three years, under the governance of our new company, now run exclusively by Gendigm, we were able to bring to term children that were resistant to everything from the common cold to HIV.
In the last few months I had been extracting a range of antibodies and natural killer cells from the latest childrens’ blood and testing them for their effect on HIV-4. I had found a combination that seemed to not only attack the virus but kill it, even when it mutated, and we were almost ready to start Annie, who was now sicker than ever, on the treatment. The cells that I’d extracted from the modified children in the first round of trials had kept her alive this long, but her illness continued to advance and I knew if we didn’t do something soon she’d be dead within months. If we were successful — not only her but tens of thousands of people around the world would be cured.
In the last few hours, though, Annie had started to develop a fever and we weren’t quite sure what was causing it.
Conception: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (Perfectible Animals Book 1) Page 18
