“What if it fails?” Anthony said. “What then? The company will be left with nothing.”
“We’ll still have our military contract,” I said.
A week later, Klaus and I met with both Jan from HGM and a woman named Sarah from a government funding body assigned to us by the Prime Minister. After a six hour meeting we organized the creation of an entirely new entity that would be controlled fifty-one percent by Geneus, but that would be funded by both HGM and the government. All the necessary patents relating to the project would either be transferred or licensed to the new company, but if anything went wrong, or the company went bankrupt, or could no longer continue to operate, then Geneus would be protected.
The only caveat, Jan insisted, before agreeing to everything, was that HGM had first rights to purchase the company if Geneus was no longer able to continue to run it. Klaus wasn’t happy about establishing a pre-set price for this, but he finally conceded.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
SIX MONTHS LATER, I sat in the boardroom of our new company, EidoGenesis.
“So, do you think we’re ready?” Klaus said.
“Yes I do,” I replied.
Over the last six months we had modified hundreds of batches of SCID-hu mice. The first few batches hadn’t produced the desired results, but then slowly, using everything we’d learned during our military trials, we managed to create mice that were resistant to first one disease and then another, and eventually we created one that was resistant to absolutely everything we threw at it.
From there we moved on to trials with macaques, and our success was replicated. We decided to call the first one Lucy, in homage to the Australopithecus afarensis who was once thought to be the oldest living relative of the Homo sapiens lineage. Not only was Lucy’s immune system excellent, but she was extremely friendly and cooperative as well.
Lucy had been born just in time. Ever since the annihilation of the inhabitants of the de-reg zone, Annie’s health had been rapidly deteriorating. First it was pneumonia and then bronchitis and lately it was simply exhaustion and depression. After the failure of our somatic modifications to cure her, my only hope now was that a germline modified child might be able to provide us with the antibodies and the natural killer cells that were required to treat her.
Three months later, Masanori and I drove through the area where, just a year before, tens of thousands of people had lived. After the napalming, I had assumed that the fence would be taken down, but all that had happened was that more people in the regulated zone had been made redundant and had been forced to move out there. New shacks and shanty towns were going up in place of the old and it was as bad as ever. The government had sectioned off any arable land, though, and food shortages in the regulated zone, which had been getting worse before the release of Rebola, were no longer a problem.
Annie and I had been in contact with Gilda on a number of occasions and had provided her and Sam with the necessary means to move out to one of the New Church havens, and they’d been living there for the last few months. I wasn’t sure what had happened to Boon, but Gilda said the survivors were all lying low. All up there’d been nearly five hundred of them.
Because we required a lot of space for our new clinic and wanted to avoid any potential viral contamination to the general population, we chose an old hospital in a deserted rural town about three hours drive from the city. We’d had it completely remodeled and fully fenced off, and that afternoon, Masanori and I walked into the foyer. With over thirty rooms, there would be plenty of space for the new mothers to be comfortable for the duration of their pregnancies, and once the children were born, there would be enough space to house them as well. When the children reached the age of five, we had plans to reintegrate them back into normal society, but until that age they would be carefully monitored and tested to judge the exact extent of our modifications.
Today, though, we were here to interview and run physical exams on potential mothers. It wasn’t just enough for these women to be fit. For the next five years they would be required to live in this facility and raise their children here, almost totally isolated from the rest of society. They needed to be sound of mind as well as of body.
Beatrice, the head doctor on the project, met Masanori and I, and we headed down to a meeting room together to interview the short-listed applicants who had just finished taking a tour of the facility.
First on the list was a woman called Mabel, and once we were all seated she was shown into the room.
“So, who’s the father?” Mabel said as she sat down, her curly hair bobbing around her wide, smiling face.
“The father’s genes will come from a random selection of men with IQ’s over one hundred and twenty,” Beatrice said, obviously not getting Mabel’s joke.
“Well, I’m not the brightest cookie on the planet, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to give them a good education, however smart they are.”
“Can you tell us a little bit about why it is you want this job?” Beatrice said.
“My parents are getting old, and neither of my two brothers is any use for anything. We’ve managed to survive, but it’s getting harder and harder to find work these days, and the last thing we want is to move to the de-reg zone.”
“And who will look after your parents while you’re here?”
“I’ll send the money back. Food and board are included here, aren’t they?”
“Yes, they are,” Beatrice said. “Have you ever had any children of your own?”
“I’ve always wanted to. I guess I just haven’t found the right man yet.” Mabel smiled, dimples creasing inwards.
“No medical problems that you know of preventing it?”
“None that I know of. But I guess you never know until you try, do you? Although maybe I shouldn’t say that.” Mabel covered her mouth.
Beatrice smiled. “It’s okay. That’s fine.”
Beatrice continued through the long list of questions and then Mabel was shown out.
“What do you think?” Beatrice said.
“I liked her,” I said, thinking she’d be a lot easier to get along with than Beatrice would be.
“Me too,” Masanori said.
“Okay, next,” Beatrice called to her assistant.
All together one hundred women were interviewed over the next five days. I didn’t sit in on all of the interviews but took turns with Masanori. When I wasn’t there, I made myself familiar with the labs and took long walks in the surrounding desert. A forest had once grown around here, but now only dry shrubs grew in the eroded soil.
A month later, twenty women had been chosen and were living on-site at the clinic, and we were ready to impregnate them with modified embryos.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come with me?” I said to Annie as I was packing my bags.
“Yes. I’ll meet you there in a few weeks.”
Annie had decided she wanted to stay and spend some time with friends and family before moving out to the clinic. It might be the last chance she got to see them. I didn’t want to leave her behind, but I knew I was going to have no time for anything but work over the next few weeks anyway.
“I’m going to miss you.” I wrapped my arms around her neck.
“I’m going to miss you, too.”
That evening, I ran across from my room at the clinic to the main concrete building which housed the labs and the offices. An afternoon storm had broken around six and everything smelled sweet and fresh. A breeze sent tingles of cold through me as it evaporated the water on my skin, but it wasn’t really cold, and I knew as soon as the rain stopped it would be a warm, humid night.
I walked down an empty corridor past some offices and took a seat in the small conference room next to Yolanda. Justin, Masanori and Beatrice were also there. Richard came in a moment later and sat down on the other side of Yolanda, looking at her in a way which made me think his feelings for her ran deeper than just collegial affection.
“Well, all the bi
o-vectors are ready,” Richard said, rubbing his hands together, referring to the vectors into which we had inserted the DNA to make the required changes to the embryos.
“What about the surrogates?” Masanori said.
“All ready,” Beatrice said.
“We need them in top physical condition,” Masanori said. “We’ll need daily monitoring as well, rather than bi-weekly.”
“That will be fine,” Beatrice said. “It’s already been taken care of.”
Over the next few days we began the process of harvesting eggs from the women who were ovulating. Before I had arrived they had all been on a treatment of reproductive hormones to encourage several eggs to develop in their ovaries at the same time. We gave them trigger shots of chorionic gonadotropin to induce final maturation before Beatrice punctured their abdominal walls and sucked the eggs out of their ovaries.
The sperm we had chosen were from a variety of donors and the first step was to thaw it and mix it with the eggs. The newly fertilized eggs were then transferred to a growth medium at the right temperature until, forty eight hours later, each blastocyst consisted of six to eight cells.
Once they’d reached the right size, the developing embryonic stem cells were then separated into two groups: one to be modified and the other to be used as the control group. The cells of the group to be modified were exposed to our bio-vectors, which added the new DNA to the genome. The other group were put aside to be introduced as they were.
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-TWO
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 a
nd 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.”
Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) Page 18
