Resistant

by Rachael Sparks

  “So the murine experiments are improving?” Persy prompted Veronica, who nodded eagerly.

  Rory, seated next to her father, whispered, “Murine means mouse.”

  “I knew that,” he deadpanned back.

  “Yes, for the first time, they are exhibiting success with the antibodies we’re terming Ror alpha, Ror beta, etc., through Ror lambda. Compared to the prior batch we drew from Rory’s blood sample, which was more refined and possibly excluded certain antibodies unexpectedly, test-subject survival is currently at ninety-nine percent.”

  “So up from fifty-seven percent last round? That’s good,” Persy nodded.

  “And nice to hear some of those poor mice are surviving,” Jeff joked. “Your lab rat budget was getting scary.”

  Persy looked to Emile.

  Emile cleared his throat. “On the topic of cell-wall targeting, bad news. Unchanged from last week—I’ve had acceptable levels of success with seven of our twelve target pathogens that caused the most deaths during the die-off, but they continue to mutate. They are growing and changing, evolving faster than we can develop a molecule that will defeat them.”

  Rory leaned close to her father again. “Emile is the one building the microscopic-sized structures from carbon molecules that can punch through bacteria’s walls, but he’s seen it work a little differently in different types of bacteria. They’re learning,” she whispered.

  “Are you still receiving a good supply of samples from our contacts?” Jeff interrupted from the corner. A crucial tenet of their research, required by the billionaire, was to always be testing current samples of bacteria isolated from patients worldwide. If they worked in a bubble, Jeff theorized, final results might still fall short of what the world needed now. Bacteria mutated too often to assume that the strains they kept growing for their research were a true model of the real world.

  “Yes, we are,” Emile confirmed. “And the mutations are in those strains, too. It makes sense—we’re looking at both Gram-positives and Gram-negatives, aerobic and anaerobic—so I guess they’ve sub-adapted considerably. My team is also mapping the samples we’re receiving into Rory’s database, and we may soon be learning more from that data.”

  “So the cell wall still seems to be the issue, correct?” Persy asked.

  “Right,” Emile agreed. “We know the resistance gene gave bacteria an enhanced cell wall defense mechanism against antibiotics, but we’re still trying to understand the nuances cropping up now between species. We’re using both molecular pairing techniques and gene sequencing, to see if there’s something changed in their genes that we could work on.”

  “Ah—that reminds me. Where are we on sequencing Rory’s genes?”

  “I can answer—I took that over from Veronica,” Rory spoke up. “It’s still a little sketchy, and I’ve got a lot of noise in the data that isn’t just epigenetic variations.” Referring to the DNA sequences that were once thought to be useless, then discovered about half a century earlier to govern the expression of other neighboring genes, Rory meant that her own DNA was coming through the sequencer with genes no computers or databases could recognize. “There’s nothing in existing libraries to match the gene sequences that are showing up in the data. I’m left wondering if it’s me—literally, my DNA—or the DNA sequencing equipment. Or, of course, user error.”

  “That’s my first culprit,” Petre laughed. “Send me what you’re seeing, and I’ll try to help.”

  “Thanks,” Rory said with a grateful smile, “I will. Fortunately, I keep seeing the same apparent errors. So there’s consistency.”

  “Well, let’s have Petre check your methods. Garbage in, garbage out, you know,” Persy advised. The age-old computer science adage warned that data and research performed or gathered without exact methods would always yield inexact, or garbage, results.

  Petre gave a sigh. “Well, since I’m last in this lineup, you should know my results are looking worse.”

  “Specificity?” Persy guessed. Rory sensed Petre’s dejection at being the champion of a treatment method that wasn’t very popular. The history of using bacteriophages, or phages for short, to treat bacterial infections was a long and winding one, fraught with research that had been validated as often as it had been debunked. Rory had studied the research topic in the past, and more recently refreshed herself, but Petre himself was a walking textbook of how to use the viruses that preyed on bacteria to hunt down bacteria in the human body. He gave Persy an update, a confirmation of the problem she had known—that the bacteriophages themselves had preferences for specific bacteria. Matching the bacteriophage strain to the bacterial strain you wanted to target was difficult enough, but keeping the virus active and viable and getting it into the patient was another world of challenges. Viruses were often unstable, requiring a live cell culture to “inhabit” to avoid their degradation into useless bits of protein and genetic material. Delivery in itself was a key component to the success of any treatment. If drugs were likely to make it to patients all over the world with success, then they had to be easy to deliver, from how they were swallowed or injected, all the way up to what refrigeration, if any, would be required to maintain their efficacy after shipping. And Petre was still stuck on an obstacle miles ahead of those issues.

  “I feel like I’m hearing the same conversations happening every week,” Jeff spoke up at a lull in the conversation between Persy and Petre. He leaned forward on his knees and looked them each in the eye. “I told you guys when we started this, we needed to break the mold of what traditional thoughts and approaches have been brought to this problem. It’s why I brought you all together, because your research was brilliant. I need you guys to try harder here. Rory—do you mind if I share the story of your friend?”

  Rory shook her head. “Go ahead.”

  “Rory’s friend AJ is missing. We believe she’s been captured by TEAR because Rory knew she had a serious infection and gave her a transfusion. Everyone here knows the transfusion must have worked, because almost a month later, she’s still alive. In theory, this young woman is now a new clue for their research teams to solve this before we do.”

  Silence filled the room until Veronica voiced confusion.

  “Jeff, I’m not trying to undermine your motivations for us, we appreciate them. But . . . that doesn’t make scientific sense. Rory’s antibodies shouldn’t be present in her friend’s bloodstream still. They naturally break down.”

  “Reassuring yourself with ‘shoulds’ is a pretty shitty way to do this research. In fact, that word might just get outlawed around here. If anyone had ever done what they should have for the past sixty years and stopped abusing antibiotics, we wouldn’t all have buried several of our loved ones. If you go around assuming that everything will behave the way it should, you won’t be making any new history.” The fury in Jeff’s voice was tempered only out of respect for the individuals assembled.

  Rory stood and walked to the window, her mind whirling with that itchy feeling that she knew something her brain wouldn’t translate. But AJ and Navy were filling her mind, too.

  “You’re right,” Persy agreed. “And let’s try to quit using that mindset. But Veronica is also right, Jeffrey. Rory’s antibodies are only helpful for a short period in the recipients.”

  “Quit fucking assuming! Rory is an anomaly. She’s evolved something no one else has.”

  “Well, technically that’s wrong, too,” Emile said quietly, and Jeff’s blazing eyes pinned him down. He shrugged, daunted but righteous. “Evolution happens at a population level, over millennia. We can’t see it here in one person, only the results of it.”

  “You’re goddamned right about one thing: you can’t see. You need to quit trying to see things as you always have!” Jeff shouted. The room fell silent as Jeff stood and paced to the windows.

  “Strong convictions, weakly held,” Byron said quietly. All eyes looked to him.

  Byron stood now, too, and made a gesture with open hands that seemed to
acknowledge everyone’s points of view.

  “Evolution happens everywhere there is an environmental pressure. Either a species survives that pressure or is killed by it. Yes, humanity is currently on the losing end of that story, and yes, we are all here doing our best to reverse that. Let’s agree for the moment that Rory’s body has an adaptation we don’t yet fully understand and we all generally agree is beneficial to her own survival. Hopefully to all of ours as well. What I think we all need to do is take a break, return to work, and remember that a bias toward what we have always known is very natural, very human. It also slows the process of discovery. We need to use what we know, but we also need to be open to learning something we don’t already know. We need to have strong convictions that are weakly held.”

  Everyone nodded throughout the room, a few repeating it to themselves quietly. Persy called an end to the meeting, and Emile, Veronica, and Petre left. Rory stayed where she was, leaning against a low cabinet with her arms crossed over her chest.

  “Well done,” Jeff told Byron. “Sorry I—”

  “Don’t be,” Persy interrupted him. “They needed it. We all do. The only bias here should be a bias toward action.”

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  Trees Uptorn

  CHAPTER 28

  * * *

  Outside Woodstock, Virginia

  Towering pines of the Shenandoah National Forest surrounded Navy and Army as they hiked toward the location of the compound where they suspected survivors were being kept. Their intel showed that a decent number of people commuted to the site daily, and the majority were more qualified to work in a hospital. But their suspicions were confirmed when one of Jeff’s computer “analysts,” as they were politely termed—actually hackers with access to the most sophisticated surveillance tools Army had ever had the pleasure of playing with—reported a biomedical waste incinerator was on the property. Only the presence of active research and living patients would necessitate a regular stream of biomedical waste.

  “All right, let’s go over this again—high level,” Navy said. “Plan A: surveillance for sufficient confirmation that this is our place. Infiltrate when we know enough about the security setup. Install cameras. Find AJ. Extract AJ, hike back to the heli, go home, have a beer, and plan for Phase 2.” In Phase 2, they would extract every donor and return them all to their families.

  Army typically would have picked up where he’d left off and explored the contingency plans they’d rehearsed in case of Plan A going off script.

  “Can we talk about Plan F?” Army asked instead. Navy sent him a wry grin. Plan F was their private code for fuckered, or what to do if everything went wrong.

  “Always have to,” Navy nodded.

  “Yeah, but I keep thinking . . . if we took Plan A and stopped at installing bugs, then camped here for a few days while Jeff organized reinforcements, we could storm the castle and rescue all the fair maidens at once.”

  “If the security isn’t extreme.”

  “You’ve seen the satellite images. There’s nothing to indicate that they’ve militarized this place other than fencing and a gate with a couple guards.” Army pressed a point he’d made several times before. “Once AJ is extracted, they’ll move this compound again like they did after Persephone freed you and me.” Persephone had found them when her own curiosity had led her through the maze of paperwork and military stonewalling that prevented most TEAR researchers from knowing where their donor blood samples originated.

  Only her own suspicions—and fears that the truth might be worse than those suspicions—had driven her to keep digging until she found how and where the “donor farm” was really conducted. Over thirty individuals, ranging from children to middle-aged patients, were being held in a nondescript building outside of Alexandria, Virginia. A team of medical professionals kept them in induced comas, hidden from their families, unconscious to and unknown by the world. Navy and Army had been at the same facility, though they were being used as lab rats instead of a source of blood antibodies to test. Dr. Rajni had proceeded to human trials without Persephone’s agreement, and their SEAL team had been among the second round of “volunteers”—the first had all died, as had every member of their team save the two of them. When Persephone discovered it and argued with Rajni that volunteers didn’t need to be chained to gurneys, Rajni had begged her to let the trial continue, convinced that Army and Navy would survive.

  Persephone agreed to keep it quiet, but she had returned late that night and released them both. When Rajni discovered it, he and Persephone had argued bitterly, but he’d agreed to cover it up. At that point, all three of them knew it was time for them to die, at least publicly. Persephone contacted Jeff, who had reached out in the past to entice her to join a pharmaceutical company he owned. She begged him to help them all. With that call, the Resistance was born.

  Army pressed, “Once they move it a third time, we might never find it again. We should do this thing right, do it now, do it once.” He advocated for a complete takedown of the donor farm and recovery of every person he and Navy had themselves helped to enslave.

  “You hiding a Ranger team in your pocket?”

  Army chuckled. “Those pansies?” Then he sobered, stopped and turned to his oldest friend. “Seriously, brother. We could find people. Jeff has the connections—soldiers who retired and went into private firms. International teams, too.”

  Navy shook his head. “We risk exposing the whole Resistance before there’s a cure to offer. The military would just tell the public that they were trying to save everyone. Sacrifice a few to reach the greater goal. No one will ever believe us that they’re trying to commercialize a cure and control who gets it.”

  Army shrugged. “By that logic, the only way to really expose them would be to give them the cure, watch them try to control it, and then tell the world we have it, too, and everyone’s getting it for free. Every person who tricked us into robbing families of their loved ones—every last fucking one of them—they’ll never be punished.”

  Frustrated, Navy turned and kept hiking, knowing Army was right. But right now, Plan F was still too fuckered to work.

  CHAPTER 29

  * * *

  Hibernia Wind and Energy Farm

  “So we followed every step correctly . . . I don’t get it.” Petre rubbed the bridge of his long aquiline nose, and his glasses wobbled loose before he caught them and shoved them back. They sat in Rory’s lab comparing her prior results with their new attempt together. He kept rereading Rory’s DNA sequence results after running the test for her, hoping for something to jump out at him. Science was, in itself, messier than any researcher wanted to admit; samples could get tainted with a stray bit of DNA from another person, from bacteria, even from a speck of lab rat dandruff. Imperfection wasn’t unusual, it was expected, but if they followed the steps again and again until they finally got it right, eventually they would be sure to see a new, sensible result.

  Rory’s, however, were consistently wrong, as if her DNA sample were being corrupted the same exact way every time. Having Petre run the sample should have eliminated that possibility.

  “Yes, and if it were genetic sequences that made sense, that matched up with any other human library known out there, it wouldn’t be a big deal. I could entertain the idea that I’m carrying some unique mutations. Hell, that would be great news. But this isn’t in any database. I’ve even run it against primate databases. I can’t see it being anything but an error,” Rory reasoned. “Maybe we need to get a technician to check the equipment?”

  Petre leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, and stared up at the ceiling. “Well, like your father said, it could be a mutation we haven’t seen before. It would be unusual, but still—let’s think without bias, right?”

  Rory hitched herself up onto a countertop and gave a dry laugh. “You know, if you upend all your assumptions . . . then logic would follow that the government researchers have already solved this. We are probab
ly laboring under an assumption that they haven’t found the answer.”

  “Couldn’t it also imply we’ve found it, but don’t know yet?” Petre asked, puzzled.

  Rory nodded. “I’ve actually had that feeling for weeks. Like it’s just within my grasp. Up here.” She tapped her forehead.

  Petre smiled. “My mother was a brilliant physicist. She believed that all ideas are already conceived, just waiting in a dormant state for some moment of revelation. She was very spiritual. To her, ideas were the only things that were timeless, and our bodies, our brains, were just their vessels. Like, you know, the mitochondrion?”

  Rory tipped her head, considering it. The mitochondrion was considered the powerhouse of the cells of multicellular organisms, because it took in nutrients and broke them down for human cells to use. Single-celled bacteria didn’t have mitochondria. Mitochondria had its own DNA, termed mtDNA, and current scientific thinking posited that mitochondria were once, long ago when life on Earth was new, separate bacteria that evolved to be an integral part of the complex cells as we knew them now, performing a function for the cell and receiving protection within it.

  She looked up at Petre as both their expressions changed from confusion to a dawning new idea.

  “Do you think this is mitochondrial DNA?” she asked, and at the same time he said, “Did you check mtDNA databases?” They both rushed to their computer stations and ran the analysis, but it didn’t take long to disprove their theory. None of the nonsense sequences in Rory’s DNA matched current databases of mtDNA, which hadn’t changed in millennia.