by L. L. Fine
But if it happens tomorrow? Or even a few weeks, in my case? One cancer cell suddenly forms and begins to reproduce itself without end, without control, without anything to stop it. And it eats you from the inside. It's suddenly scary, and I think about it more and more. Death, scary. And it's not just a death, it is a nasty cancer death, making you a walking, vomiting skeleton. This is what I expect for myself. It surely would happen to me if I was not who I am and in the place I am.
Then I would discover it in about a year, with metastases in the whole body and brain, because sometimes it's a fast cancer, and I would die a sorrowful death. Even as a child I didn’t have to read chapters from the Talmud. Maybe I should have. Why should I ruin another man’s life, with my fucked-up genes?
Forget it.
Soon I’ll know if it happens to me or not. Or other things will happen to me, the story is dangling by a thread. I promise to update you about what happens, when it happens. I will also tell you how Lia wants to solve the problem, which is by killing me a little bit, I think.
About the second issue, the honey trap I told you about - a really good idea, I'm surprised I haven't thought of it before. But better late than never, as my teacher used to say.
I flew to New York to close some loose ends, then give it a try. Or not, I'm not sure of anything lately. I'll let you know when that happens, too. Here, I'm pretty sure it will work well, then I (I!) will have the most powerful computer anyone ever had. It makes my fingers tingle to know I have such power…mine are tingling, anyway.
Anyway, I checked your computer, and I'm glad to tell you that you will definitely be a partner in this new effort. It won’t hurt you, you won’t feel it, but you'll be glad you helped me.
Thank you.
And by the way, thank you indeed. For everything.
Yours.
*
I think this was the first time I was really moved by him. It was, without a doubt, the first time I really believed him, believed every word he said.
*
A new fragrance sweetened the air of the Enchanted Garden.
It was not a revolutionary innovation, of course. The Enchanted Garden was accustomed to new scents. Evening, morning, thousands of new trees grew there. Evening, morning, tens of thousands of fragrant shrubs were created within it. Evening, morning, millions of fascinating flowers were enchanted in it, billions of small leaves, insects, vermin, and other strange creatures were engineered inside it, making sounds in the ever-changing foliage. Evening, morning, the Enchanted Garden turned into something else. Always.
But this morning change was sharper than usual.
And the new scent was sweeter than normal. Intoxicating. Infectious. Even the oldest, wisest, did not remember scents like it. Scents winking from afar, pulling to the nectar spring, causing all who tasted it getting excited, and infecting others with enthusiasm.
This was something in the nectar that lifted their spirits. It had an ancient, warm, friendly aroma. Flamed like a bonfire at night. A warm hug in a room full of strangers. There was something soothing, about this nectar. Both relaxing and exciting.
And it had a special quality: everyone who tasted it experienced an amazing feature: suddenly they could talk to anyone else who tasted the nectar. Without effort. Without knowing, even. And the garden is so huge, so global, so full of strangers, this nectar was something contagious. Something addictive.
One, two, ten, nine hundred, fifty thousand, a million. The number of ants partaking of the nectar has grown at a dizzying pace. Exciting. Whole hives were washed in it, full colonies suddenly dived in it.
As in a huge feast, the garden started changing to the color of golden nectar, filled with strange huddle of high and low voices, feminine, masculine, and other. Evening, morning, there was sound. More nectar features were exposed. More and more wonders.
Garden dwellers found they could make friends through it, to fall in love with it. Different beetles, more cautious by nature, sipped nectar - and were gilded immediately. Bee nests, colonies of wasps, fast-flying flies and hard-shelled snails, the nectar aroma reached everyone. And many drank it.
Two million, fifty million, two hundred million. Nectar for everyone, rich and delicious nectar, sticky and juicy nectar. Just come to the spring and drink, and the nectar will always be with you. Just come and drink, come and taste, come and indulge.
And in the heart of the fragrant spring, where the nectar was so concentrated you couldn't see anymore, Zomy opened a joyful eye, and began to pump, gently, a little bit of the vigor of the addicts to this goldenness.
And they? Did not feel it at all.
05/2/01 IRC
Chromosome: It happened.
Looking for a Challenge: Who? What?
Chromosome: I got the shot a few hours ago.
Looking for a Challenge: Injection?
Chromosome: Against cancer. The injection.
Looking for a Challenge: And ..?
Chromosome: That's all. Waiting.
Looking for a Challenge: Is Lia with you? How do you feel?
Chromosome: Nothing. Meanwhile. Waiting.
Chromosome: Yes, she’s with me.
Looking for a Challenge: I thought it wasn't going to happen yet! You said it would take months!
Chromosome: The onset of the disease will take months. Maybe not so much. The serum took a week to develop. I haven’t tried it before. Lia says it's madness.
Looking for a Challenge: Real stupid.
Chromosome: I know. But I don’t think I would have acted differently if we were checking it on mice.
Chromosome: Well gotta go. Bye.
Looking for a Challenge: What? Wait a sec!
Looking for a Challenge: Sec…
Looking for a Challenge: Shit
*
"It's cold."
Lia glanced at him. A small, thin, man, lying alone on a foreign hotel bed, covered with a thick blanket. One hand on some attached IV bags. The second hand twisting pink, old toilet paper. Goosebumps on his skin.
From the corner of her eye she saw the window, partially obscured by a thick curtain. Somewhere, behind it, New York shook off the last remnants of winter; the cheerful sun shone on the park. It will soon be very hot here, she thought.
But Zomy was cold.
And for good reason. A large bag of ice lay on his chest, deep under the covers.
"You have to weaken the immune resistance of your lungs," she told him before. "It's like a cold - the body should be cold for the viruses to have good conditions to work."
For several hours.
She looked up at the sophisticated monitor which was really nothing more than a mobile computer and a thread. 38.4 degrees Celsius, the sensors reported from his anus, deep under the thick blanket. Rapid pulse, almost 110.
She didn’t need a monitor to know his condition. Series of coughs, getting worse and worse, attacked Zomy every few minutes. He also contributed to the diagnosis, and reported, casually, a growing feeling of suffocation. A hint of the percentage of oxygen in his blood, steadily declining as his lungs became less and less effective.
Without a doubt, Zomy was sick. Very much so.
"What’s happening?" he wheezed.
Lia came to him with a soothing, fake smile. Soft hand wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, and strengthened the smile.
"It'll be okay. What are you worried about?"
But she was worried. Very. She had never seen such a case. The first signs of deterioration began little more than half an hour after she shot him the virus culture. Lia was also surprised by the violence as it all started to happen. Even internal burns in the lung, she tried to calculate, were less aggressive than what raged in Zomy.
She almost heard his lung bubbles expire one by one, as nylon explodes in the hands of a hyperactive child. Peck. Fitz. Peck Fitz.
And such bubbles, stopped, lowered the efficiency of the lungs. Peck. Fitz. Peck Fitz. Groups of bubbles disappeared and made Zomy's blood p
oorer in oxygen, bluer. Peck. Fitz.
How long did he have? Lia didn’t know. The virus she engineered hadn’t been tried before. It was all a guess. Its effectiveness hadn’t been tested before. True, it had to be aggressive. But how? She just guessed. And Zomy didn’t let her check it out in simulation. He didn’t let her try the serum on even laboratory mice, which could be sacrificed without giving explanations to anyone.
But what would it help? Anyway, the serum was designed to work on humans, not mice. Correction: on Zomy, and Zomy only. On the special structure of his DNA. Herself, it would affect differently. Apparently.
"Take Advil," she said, and handed him two caps. The ibuprofen in them was not supposed to interfere with the viruses, but it would probably lower the fever slightly. 39.7 degrees. Now, ice or no ice? Zomy burned externally, a signal of the internal struggle that occurred within.
What a crazy bet, she thought again and again.
What madness.
And she told him. She told him it wasn’t going to be easy, even if it succeeded. Even if the serum worked, there are always the side effects. Even if Zomy survived the process, it’s likely that other things would happen.
"Lungs aren't hands," she told him. "Do not play with them!"
And she begged him not to hurry, they still had time.
"Let's check it again, let's see what happens at least with mice! With dogs! Let's at least do another simulation of the process."
"Let there be at least one fucking successful simulation," she murmured finally.
At last one.
But Zomy was not listening. She had never seen him so full of fire, almost fanatical about the idea of the medicine. Like a Roman general on a gladiator diet, she thought. "Give it to me! Shoot the bastards!" he yelled at her this morning, a complete contrast to this gray shadow, now trembling under the covers.
And she knew, then, how much worse it could be. The simulations they had done were not positive. The previous generation, the first of the virus, led to the death of virtual Zomy in two days. Signs, she remarked to herself, those signs.
So, yes, they fixed the virus. So what? Small jaws could still kill. Peck, Fitz. Peck Fitz.
He’s likely to die, she thought suddenly. Here, now, in the next hour. He’d prepared for it - rented her another hotel room on the other side of the park. Made sure to buy her tickets to a Broadway show just in the critical hours. She arranged the perfect escape route, and made sure she would know exactly where she should be and what to do next.
They had not come up to this room together. She crept up to this floor an hour after he was already there, in a time window of three minutes when all the hotel's surveillance cameras mysteriously stopped working.
He also told her when to escape the room. "If I'm not functioning by then, you take yourself and run out. You won’t have a second chance."
She looked at the clock. She needed to move in a few minutes.
So she couldn’t even get him to the hospital in time. Anyway, there was no doctor in the world, not even she, that could save him. Now he was alone with his battle. Alone, alone.
Cause of death, she knew, would be something like 'sudden respiratory failure’.
And no physician in the world would know why.
*
"Listen, there is a certain probability that it will work!" she remembered herself shouting to him a few months before.
"What’s a certain probability!?" he demanded to know. Both of them were on the beach of Rishon Lezion, enjoying the cool, strong breeze, which prevented the possibility of anyone eavesdropping on them. Despite the winter, they were dressed only in the minimum necessary.
"A few percent!"
"How many?"
They already knew what the problem was with him. Genetically, at least. One of the sections of the DNA, designed to grow young tissue where cells died, failed to get a stop command after completing the restoration work. Following this, the cells continued to build. Without a break. Without limit. Without restraint. And to no avail.
A more interesting definition of cancer, she could not think of.
And just the night before, she had found a new Australian study report after a frantic search for all the knowledge in the world on the subject.
Zomy's defective intron, the piece of DNA that controls the “tissue engine” was losing exactly 15 layers, and going out of action. The result was lung cancer. Particularly violent. Incurable.
"So how do you think to cure it!?" he shouted into the wind.
"Not to cure! To vaccinate!"
"What?!"
"Before it starts! Fix your DNA!"
"How?"
The wind whistled intensely and Zomy drank it deeply, enjoying the salt water crispness, feeling free, feeling power that only the wind can give. Lia, however, had suffered enough. It was too cold and too hard to scream into the wind.
"We'll replace the damned part!"
"Yes, how?" he repeated the question.
"Well, there's only one thing in the world that can get into the DNA and replace the defective part."
"A virus!?"
"Exactly!"
Viruses, he knew, were no more than pieces of pure DNA, wrapped in a protective coating of protein. No metabolism, no trace of 'meat'. Pure pieces of information of genetic blueprint just waiting to stick to a living engine, and control it.
A simple and a deadly act. Once the contact is made between a virus and a suitable living cell, the virus sheds its protective protein capsule and infiltrates the cell. Now, without physical defenses in front of it, everything is open. The virus enters the cell nucleus, taking over the DNA, modifies it and starts producing copies of itself.
Of course, such an invasion of a virus that changes the DNA sequence impairs the functioning of the cell. Usually irreversibly.
The wind whistled with less intensity, and they both walked on the beach, waiting in silence for the next increase of its static noise. Without realizing it, Zomy's hand found that of Lia, putting their fingers together.
The wind accelerated and their hands parted.
"So you mean to engineer a virus that will replace the intron that’s fucking me up!?"
"In theory it could work!" she shouted back.
The wind accelerated more and more, freezing them, stabbing them with the shards of cold water and salt. They both wished separately for a hot shower.
"I think I'll stay with radiation and chemotherapy," he said more quietly.
"What!"
This time it was Zomy’s turn to fight a particularly strong gust. The wind penetrated his mouth and lungs, and for a moment prevented him from speaking. Finally, after a second breath, he blurted out, "I said I'll try chemotherapy!"
"It won’t work! Not type this cancer!"
"Why?"
"Because it just will not work! There's no cure yet! Maybe surgery will help!"
"In the lungs?!"
"I said maybe - this cancer has almost one hundred percent mortality!"
*
The problem was, of course, they were partisans.
None of the other team members knew about Zomy’s private genosimulation, and certainly none of his superiors knew. It was a completely private initiative, without assistance, without an orderly time frame. Partisans in the corridors, in the laboratories, partisans in a so far unknown research field.
So far, only a few genosimulations had been made. Most of them were flat worms, bacteria, mice. More on the list: three dogs, one chimpanzee and one offical human genosimulation.
No, not of Zomy. The official human genosimulation was of someone else entirely, said to be an anonymous prisoner who later died. Zomy, in turn, had another theory. It was hard not to recognize her once the subject's adult face was revealed. It was hard not to smile.
Officially, the study was not easy, and devoured huge computing resources. They, as partisans, were able to utilize only a fraction of those resources. While Lia was one brilliant genetic engineer, she was
not the most senior. Although Zomy was the all-capable computer man of the complex, he was not the only one.
Resources were allocated and stored carefully.
"It's like hitting one specific pigeon out of hundreds of pigeons, flying fast, just a few hundred yards above the head, with a gun."
"With or without a sight?"
Zomy was the mathematician of the pair; he did not need her to calculate his odds.
And yet they loaded the gun with some bullets.
It was not easy. Creating a completely new virus was not an option, although its rules came from experience. No. Better by far was to base it on an existing model. A prototype.
"It was engineered a few years ago," she told him, "as the basis for carrying DNA even under extremely high heat."
"And to whom does it belong?" he could not resist asking.
"It’s a mutation of Anthrax that will withstand the explosion of a missile."
"Oh."
"It has a very interesting mechanism of DNA housing. Well, well… don’t underestimate it."
"Underestimating? Am I?"
"I know that look. In a nutshell, there’s a mechanism that I have developed. It's in the form of protein that folds in the shape of a hamantash biscuit. Why are you laughing?"
Even encoding the amino acids themselves wasn't a special problem. The real problem was to lead them to exactly the right place, the necessary floor in the tower of the DNA, a billion storeys high. This complicated the matter completely. Landing in the wrong place, they both knew, might not only neutralize the effect of the new genetic encoding, but might also interrupt the function of another genetic code, as yet unknown. What might be the consequences?
"Couldn’t be worse than has already happened," said Zomy. And rightly so. He had nothing to lose. Even in the short term.
By the end of the process, they could not encode an engine sufficiently accurate. The compromise was to magnify the replaced part in Zomy's DNA. The dangers? Enormous. The bigger the replaced part was, the more his production would contain potential errors.
