“How do you know I’m not working alone?”
“Tell us what you know about Gendigm.”
“Gendigm?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing.” I shake my head, forcing myself not to look away. I try to avoid any tells: brushing my nose or face, an unnatural delay between words and expression. “Just what everyone knows. They’re rumored to be trying to create a super-race, a new species of humans.”
“Isn’t that what you yourself are involved in?”
“I’m not trying to create a new species. I’m just making some changes to the current one.”
“According to your former colleague, Anthony, the project you were working on at Geneus also included some modifications to make humans more cooperative. Is that true?”
“There’s no secret there.”
“And the company who took over Geneus supported this research?”
“That’s no secret, either.”
“One has to wonder why, given that, according to Anthony, the research had almost no economic value.”
“I guess there are still some people in this world who don’t base all of their decisions on economic value,” I say.
“And thank God for that,” Don says, which makes me warm to him a little. “The part of your project that I’m really interested in, though, is the immune system research. Tell me about that.”
“What would you like to know that the government doesn’t already know? A lot of our work has been done for them.”
“It’s the work you’re doing now that interests me. I’m particularly worried about the possibility of your project creating a virus that might spread into the general population, whether by accident or on purpose.”
So they do know about the recent outbreak. I have been telling myself we did the right thing. But now that I am here, locked inside a prison with the full weight of society bearing down on me, I wonder if I shouldn’t be punished after all. For a moment I feel relief, as if responsibility has suddenly been taken away from me.
“We have protocols in place so that doesn’t happen,” I tell Don.
“If someone wanted to, though, couldn’t they use this for their own purposes?”
“Yes. If they wanted to. In fact, that was part of the work I was doing for the military. Have you spoken to the Prime Minister about this? Or General Savage? They were the ones we had the most to do with.”
“We have spoken to them, yes, which is partly why we’re so worried. We know what this technology is capable of.”
“The government helped fund this project. They knew about every detail of it.”
“Not every detail, I don’t think.”
“Such as?”
Don suddenly goes silent and I can see his eyes going into that blank stare people get when reading something on their visual overlays.
“Who’s Toby?” Don says.
“Toby? Why?” I say.
“Dylan mentioned he was involved.”
Toby was a rhesus macaque who had been part of our experiments on the immune system and had shown a much higher level of empathy and cooperation than an unmodified monkey. It was an unintended side effect. Why would Dylan say Toby was involved? And why would Don think he’s a person?
Then suddenly I realize. This is Dylan’s way of telling me to cooperate, like Toby did. To not give anything away. The government is trying to play us off against one another, but if we both keep quiet they won’t be able to.
“I have no idea. Why don’t you ask Dylan?”
Don says nothing and I can see him reading again.
“I think that’s enough for today,” he says when he’s done.
“Can I make a call? Or see a lawyer? Are you actually going to charge me with something?”
“Not yet, we’re not. Not until we find out more about your case. Or until you give us more information.”
I wonder if I will get to the point where I tell them everything just to get out of here.
“So you’re going to keep me here, forever?” I say.
“No. Probably not. Not if you tell us what we want to know.”
“I can’t do that until I know what that is.”
“I think you already do.”
“Why don’t you spell it out for me, then?”
“I don’t think I need to.”
“Why? Because if you lock me up for long enough I’ll make up anything just to get out of here?”
“No. I think you’ll tell us the truth.”
“And what truth is that? The one you want to hear?”
“To be perfectly honest, Michael, I’d prefer not to hear that you’re involved in a project that could potentially threaten humanity. You seem like a decent person. Like you’re trying to do something to help the world. I don’t quite understand it, to be honest.”
“So I suppose you think the world is alright like it is, do you?”
“I’m not quite sure what you mean.”
I am afraid that if I say too much more I am going to give something away. I have to make Don understand me, though. If I don’t, he’ll just keep locking me away in that cell until he finds out what he wants to know from someone else.
“I mean, look at the world. Humans are destroying it. A few years from now and it’s going to be uninhabitable.”
“So, what are you saying? That you think humans ought to be wiped out?” He crosses his arms and stares at me.
“No. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that something needs to change or we’re going to wipe ourselves out.”
“And how exactly do you plan on stopping that from happening?”
I want to tell him more about my cooperation research and how I imagine it will change things, but if Don follows my arguments logically – which he no doubt will – it’ll lead him to the same place I and the others at Gendigm were led to: that all unmodified humans might need to be either sterilized or wiped out entirely for the plan to work. A solution we had found an alternative to. Although Don, given his current line of questioning, probably won’t believe it.
“I don’t,” I say.
“Well, thanks for your time.”
“Hang on.”
“Yes?”
“Maybe you could help me with this.”
“In what way?”
“Why don’t you tell me what it is that you think I’ve done, and I’ll tell you as much as I can. Have you ever considered the possibility that we’re looking at the same thing from two different perspectives? That maybe I’ve been doing something which in my mind is perfectly fine, and which in your mind is an act of terrorism. You said I seem like a decent person. Why don’t you just trust that judgement and give me the benefit of the doubt?”
“How about this?” Don slaps his hands on the table before me. “You tell us absolutely everything you’ve been doing for the last couple of years, piece by piece, day by day. All of your work, all of your outside contacts, pretty much everything you can remember. And if there’s anything missing from that story, anything that we know about you that you’ve failed to tell us, then we’ll keep you here. If it all checks out and makes sense, then we’ll either charge you with something, if we think you’ve done something wrong, or we’ll let you go.”
“Okay,” I say, thinking at the very least it will buy me some time and let me get my thoughts in order.
“I’ll have a pen and paper sent to your room,” Don says. “You can write it all down for us. The old-fashioned way.”
CHAPTER FOUR
FOR THE NEXT few days I don’t see Don. I spend each day in my room, writing down everything I can remember about my work over the past couple of years, omitting not only the most condemning information, but anything else I can leave out without looking guilty for doing so. The cell is quiet except for the occasional scream of another inmate.
When I’m not writing, I try to exercise or meditate. Anything that will help keep my mind, body and emotions healthy. I think about Annie all the time. I wonder
where she is now: at home still, or safely on the New Church island we had planned to move to?
At night, instead of placing my head on the pillow, I lay the pillow alongside myself and hug it. I tuck my hands in my groin, where it is warm, and sleep fitfully. On a number of occasions I wake in the middle of the night, in total darkness, gasping for breath. Each time I remember the dream preceding my awakening: someone was trying to keep me quiet by holding their hand over my mouth.
I wonder how much I can trust Dylan. If he talks, I will go away for ever. I’ll never see the outside world again: never feel the sun or the breeze, never lie down with Annie at night and feel her warm, soft body next to mine. If he keeps quiet, on the other hand, there is a chance we’ll both go free. How much of a friend is he? What if he was just using the reference to Toby to keep me quiet while he tells them everything?
I think back to the time we met — sharing a room at university which he transformed into a bohemian den. Indian wall-hangings, persian carpets, bookcases filled with books, a collage of photographs of him with many different, but all extremely attractive, people, an expensive stereo, red shades over the lights and small matching lamps on our desks.
“Listen to anything you want,” he told me, connecting up a laptop filled with music to the stereo.
He had more beauty products laid out in the small cabinet in our bathroom than I even knew existed for men. He swaggered around the place, doing his yoga exercises in the morning, doing push ups in the evenings after his run, admiring himself in the mirror he’d attached to the inside of his wardrobe.
At night sometimes, we’d both lie in bed with a candle burning on our shared bedside table and the window wide open while Dylan smoked either cigarettes or joints, which I took occasional puffs of, and talk.
“What do you most fear in the world?” Dylan would ask me. Or, “what is your biggest dream?”
I didn’t have any other friends, so when I wasn’t talking to Dylan, which I didn’t do that often as he was always out, I studied or read. I liked books where heroic characters would do extraordinary things. I myself dreamed of changing the world in some extraordinary way, saving it from the disaster course it seemed to be on. I could identify with the protagonists of those stories and got excited when I read about them. Humans were capable of such genius and I imagined myself as one of the Newtons, the Gallileos, the Einsteins of future history. Those people whose minds had somehow reached up and connected with a higher intelligence; had flown like Prometheus and joined with something greater than themselves. Inspired by the unfathomable complexity of a cloud or a flower or human biology itself, their thoughts had somehow mutated, made connections, in ways which no other human mind had ever done before, and they had created the intellectual equivalent of an eye or an ear. For a few hours, absorbed in a book, anything seemed possible.
An experiment that Dylan and I conducted at this time triggered both our fascination with the competitive versus the cooperative instinct. We were trying to determine which genes were responsible for gender expression in mice, specifically for inciting male mice to attack the young of other males. The first thing we did was to eliminate the TRPC2 gene, a pheromone receptor in the nasal passage which had been proven to make mice become bisexual by removing their ability to distinguish between males and females. This modification stopped them from wanting to kill each other, but it didn’t remove their aggression towards other males’ infants. Next, we knocked out the genes for encoding progesterone and testicular androgen receptors, but that didn’t work either.
It was around this time that I came to a surprising but unpleasant realization: the real threat to survival and reproduction of many species, mice and humans especially, wasn’t another species or even the environment at all, but other members of the same species. There must have come a time when humans had discovered it was mutually beneficial to cooperate with each other in raping and pillaging others, maybe it had even become necessary for defense – but that was as far as our altruistic nature had gone. And why should it have gone any further? There was certainly no evolutionary pressure to do so. For 150,000 years, that particular mode of thinking had worked quite well. Humans had gotten ahead in the world. But with over eight billion of us still battling it out, and the environment changing rapidly, the survival of not only one individual was at stake, but that of the entire species. Something we were biologically ill-equipped to deal with.
Then, one morning, I went into our lab to where our mice were waiting in cages. The night before, we’d put the latest batch of male mice in cages with pregnant females. Ten of the females had given birth during the night, but in nine cases not a single infant was left alive. In the last one, however, the cage of mouse RV244, something unprecedented was happening. RV244 had been born in a male body, but right from the outset he had begun to display behavioral characteristics usually only shown by females. And now, not only had he not killed the infant mice who were in the cage with him, he was sharing his food with them.
* * *
My interview with Don resumes a few days later.
“So, there are just a few other things in your statement that I’m not quite sure about,” Don says.
“Yes?”
“It appears that the people at HGM Industries were introduced to Geneus through you.”
“Yes, that’s right.” HGM industries was the dummy corporation that Gendigm had created in order to invest in Geneus.
“How did you come into contact with HGM?”
We never worked out an alibi for this one, so I tell the truth. “I was introduced to them by another scientist, Bruno Salacio, who read an article I published in Genetics Today. He apparently knew Jan from HGM, and after being impressed with my research, introduced us.”
“Hmm,” Don says. “Interesting.”
“Why’s that?”
“Bruno Salacio was found dead in his apartment three weeks ago. Just after we met.”
For a moment I am stunned. Maybe I have been set up as a scapegoat for Gendigm. Maybe Bruno was too. Then I realize that Don is possibly lying to me again, and Bruno is not dead at all. Maybe they’re just trying to frighten me, to get me to talk.
“Is that all?” I say.
“Well, some bad news I’m afraid. For you, that is.”
“What’s that?”
“It appears your friend Dylan is not quite as good a friend as you thought he was.” Don says this as sarcastically as he possibly can. “He’s agreed to testify in court, about everything you and he have been up to. About your involvement with Gendigm.”
My whole body squirms as I fight for breath.
That night, I wake up in the middle of the night gasping again. In my dream, my cell was slowly filling up with water. My whole body and bed are drenched in sweat and I am freezing. I stand up in the light coming through from the passage and try to dry myself with the hand towel next to my basin. I run some warm water and splash it on my face and run it over my hands, then turn the blanket around and try to huddle underneath it again.
I can’t get back to sleep. All I can think about is being trapped inside this cell for the rest of my life and dying here. I can’t stop myself from shaking. I want to smash myself against the door, try to break out of here even though I know I can’t. I try to breathe slowly, tell myself it is going to be alright, but I know it isn’t. Even if Dylan doesn’t know everything, he knows enough to put me away for a long time.
Then I think about Annie, and the first time I woke in the middle of the night to find her sweating and feverish, just as I am now.
“Annie, what is it?” I said, feeling wet sheets around her. “You’re soaked.”
I switched the bedside light on and put a hand on her forehead but it was pretty obvious she had a fever.
“Let me get a towel,” I said, standing up and heading for the bathroom. I came back a minute later with a dry towel and a wet face cloth which I used to wipe her face down. She tried to roll over, to get out of bed, but she co
uldn’t get up.
“We’re going to have to get you to the hospital.”
“No, I’ll be fine,” she said.
“You won’t be fine. Now come on, get up and I’ll take you to the Royal Melbourne.”
Royal Melbourne hospital was a fifteen minute drive away. It had been privatized since the flooding, but at least it was still open.
“No, please. Let’s wait until morning at least. Just bring me some aspirin.”
“You don’t even know what you’ve got.”
I headed down to the kitchen. Washed out moonlight through the kitchen window was enough to see by and I took a glass from the dish rack and filled it with water. My hands shook. I thought about calling an ambulance but realized it was unnecessary. Why was it that at work I could be completely rational but when it came to Annie all reason and control left me?
“Here, take these.” I propped Annie’s head up under a few pillows and she managed to turn to one side. I fed the pills into her mouth and held the rim of the glass up to her lips. I put a towel down on the bed and made her roll over onto it. I checked her temperature, which was at forty degrees celsius, and I told her that if it got any higher I was going to take her to the hospital whether she liked it or not.
For the next few hours she fell in and out of consciousness and each time she came to I felt a sense of relief. The rest of the time I sat there in the dim light of the lamp, mopping sweat from her forehead and checking her temperature. I put one towel under her and another on top of her, but even those needed changing regularly.
“We need an IV drip. You’re losing too much fluid,” I said in one of her lucid moments, but then she blacked out again.
“I have some very bad news,” the doctor said when we ran some tests on her later that day.
“What is it?” Annie said.
“You have HIV-4.”
With global warming, mosquitoes had thrived, spreading to many new regions, even regulated sections of the developed world. Unlike HIV-1 and HIV-2, HIV-4 was very stable, stable enough to persist in the mosquito mouthparts and infect the next human the mosquito bit.
Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) Page 3
