Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
Note from the author
Acknowledgements
About Me
PERFECTIBLE ANIMALS: CONNECTION (PART I)
Thomas Norwood
Copyright © 2014 Thomas Norwood
All rights reserved.
To my parents, who made me who I am,
And Iliana, who has to put up with that.
CHAPTER ONE
SARAH MONAGHAN HAD been working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) for the last twenty-five years. Once upon a time, as the name suggested, it used to be a research body, conducting studies into anything which might better the future of the Australian population, and humanity in general, but in the time she’d been working there it had become more and more an instrument of profit. For Sarah, this represented a downward slide into barbarism, a path the world seemed determined to go down—as if someone had reversed time. But she was incapable of doing anything about it except complain, which she did to just about anyone who’d listen, including the old lady in the seat next to her of flight 529 to Guatemala.
On the other side of Sarah sat Shy, her adopted son of twenty-one years. He was asleep, as the old lady was pretending to be, and out the window of the plane Sarah saw below them the wide expanse of Lake Peten Itza in the highlands of Guatemala—a dull turquoise surrounded by roiling green rainforest. Surrounding the lake like a rash was the city of Santa Elena, its tentacles spreading far and wide into the surrounding forest.
Despite the huge population culls in the last thirty years from both natural and man-made disasters, humans insisted on continuing to procreate at ever greater rates, especially in rural areas of countries like Guatemala, which due to its isolation and relative poverty had not been as afflicted by the civil wars and corporate takeovers as the wealthier nations. No point in taking over villages of subsistence farmers, the big corps seemed to think, unless these countries had resources, of course, in which case the corps didn’t so much take the countries over as “relocate” their populations entirely—relocate being a nice way of saying “get the hell out of here.”
“Damas y caballeros, por favor aseguren sus cinturones y regresen sus asientos a sus posiciones.” Sarah fastened her seatbelt as the announcement was repeated in English.
Then Sarah heard the undercarriage of the plane groaning, a sound that always freaked her out. Despite the fact there hadn’t been a plane crash in thirty years, her body still told her that being ten thousand meters above the earth in a plastic bottle powered by hydrogen and oxygen was not natural.
“Are you okay?” Shy smiled as he woke up.
“Yeah, fine,” she said.
“You’re freaking out!”
“I am not.” She gripped the handles of her seat tighter and tried to keep her face in order.
Repairs were going on at the Mundo Maya International Airport and they had to disembark directly into the hot, humid Guatemalan air and make their way down a flimsy staircase to the tarmac, where an old, petrol-powered bus picked them up. Sarah wondered if the region had their own oil well out there, as petrol was no longer cheap.
With relief Sarah and Shy arrived inside the air-conditioned terminal.
“Purpose of your trip?” a customs official asked them in English, a young boy who seemed to take his green uniform very seriously.
“Medical research,” Sarah said.
The boy looked at her, scowled, looked at their digital images on his screen, and then ushered them through.
“Good thing we got those satellite modems,” Shy said. “I’m already getting slow speeds here. Not even 100Mbps.”
Shy was fascinated with technology, and spent almost his entire life logged into the virtual world known as v-space. He lived mainly in a place called Youtopia, a virtual world created by Homo novus—a sub-species of genetically modified humans of whom Shy was a member.
Sarah was glad Shy had Youtopia at least. She worried about him constantly, because he seemed to struggle with an almost debilitating sensitivity to the real world that had kept him living at home with her despite the fact that most kids his age had already moved out, and had prevented him from ever getting a job. Ever since his father had died, eight years ago now, it seemed to have worsened.
Sarah knew the cause of his over-sensitivity were his genetic modifications and sometimes she wondered at their usefulness. Sure, he was very loving, very caring, very generous and very cooperative, like all Homo novus, but if he could never integrate with the rest of the world, then what was the point? Still, she loved him like crazy, and devoted herself to his well-being. Probably almost too much. Maybe if she left him alone, then he would toughen up a little. But she already saw him struggling with severe depression at times, and the last thing she wanted was to lose him.
The whole airport smelled of a mixture of car fumes, humidity, fried food and drainage, and Sarah activated her favorite smell: natural mountain stream.
To protect against possible muggings and killings, Sarah had arranged a chaperone to meet them at the airport, and before them on the concourse, just after they’d rescued their bags from the carousel, stood a smiling Guatemalan man with a sign that had her name on it.
Sarah held out her hand. “Carlos, I’m Sarah, nice to meet you.”
Carlos shook her hand enthusiastically.
“And you must be Shy?” Carlos held out his hand for him as well, which Shy shook.
Carlos’s accent was a little strange. Sarah wondered if it was simply an out-of-date program or if he had learnt English the slow and natural way—with imperfect results.
Sarah had secretly hoped that Carlos would be a dark, handsome Bruno Regoletta type, so she was disappointed to find him short and balding. Never mind. She wiped her disappointment away with a single thought. She needed to concentrate on her work anyway.
As they walked through the terminal, Sarah was surprised at how short even young people there were. Back home, nobody born in the last thirty years was under a hundred and seventy centimeters thanks to genetic enhancements.
Carlos loaded them into an armored vehicle and drove them through streets crowded with people, rubbish, cars and donkeys. They reached the edge of the lake that Sarah had seen from the plane. From there they crossed a long causeway and went through guarded gates to a small island, which was entirely taken up by the town of Flores. Bumping over cobble-stones in the narrow streets, waiting as pedestrians moved languidly aside for them, they eventually pulled up at their hotel—a large, Spanish colonial mansion overlooking the water.
Sarah and Shy went inside and were greeted by young women in blue suits and white hats. Sarah noticed one of them smiling at Shy with bright eyes between jet black hair, and she thought how nice it would be if her son finally found himself a girlfriend.
After Sarah had left her bags in her room and freshened up, she met Carlos outside. He drove her back across the causeway and out through the shanty towns surrounding the lake. People stared at them as they went past. Sarah noticed a few of them had weapons. She wondered where they had gotten the money for weapons, considering they looked like they hardly had enough to eat, but she imagined, as back in the de-reg zones outside Melbourne, that the gangs who ruled made sure they were always armed, if not always fed.
Carlos drove the car up to a wire gate where two security guards bearing weapons came out to meet them. Carlos showed them his credentials. After doing a quick sweep of the car, the guards opened the gates and let them through. On the other side of the fence was what appeared to be a small warehouse but which was apparently the clinic where Sarah would be working for the next few months.
Sarah wasn’t the only new person at the clinic that day. In the small conference room which she was ushered into, fourteen other doctors and scientific researchers from around the world were already seated in the plastic fold-out chairs. On a table in the center of the room were jugs of water, plates of biscuits, and urns of coffee and tea. Sarah poured herself a cup of weak coffee and went to sit down next to a woman by a fake palm.
“My name is Madeleine,” the woman said in a heavy French accent, holding out her hand to her.
“Sarah. Pleased to meet you.”
“Australian?”
“Yes. French?”
“Obviously!” Madeleine laughed. “I’m sorry, my accent in English is terrible, but I hate using that translation software, you know? I prefer to exercise my brain.”
Sarah smiled. “Who do you work for?”
“Médecins sans frontiéres. Well, what is left of them. There aren’t many of us any more. How about you?”
“The CSIRO. What’s left of it. Which isn’t much either.”
Sarah and Madeleine discussed their work for a while and what little they knew about the disease which was being called SAID—spontaneous auto-immune disease. It was a disease that was now affecting all two thousand of the original test subjects. It wasn’t so much these two thousand test subjects who had brought medical researchers from all over the world together—but the fact that nearly every living person had now also been modified using the same code.
This code happened to be an adulterated version of the same code used for the Homo novus, which apart from making them more friendly and cooperative, also made them more resistant to disease. A year after the Homo novus had been designed, though, the company that Sarah was now visiting, Gronome, had managed to come up with a version of that code that endowed people with the immune system benefits but not the behavioral modifications—which most people saw as a great improvement on the original. Humans could go on being the greedy, selfish species they’d always been, and not get sick while they were at it.
The only problem was that now, twenty years later, something had gone wrong. Anyone modified with the original version—like Shy—was totally fine, but anyone modified with the adapted version was almost one hundred percent likely to get the same illness that the original test subjects now had—SAID.
Just as Sarah and Madeleine were discussing all of this, a company representative from Gronome, Susana, came in and welcomed them all.
“Thank you all for coming. And we’re very sorry about the lack of an appropriate setting for such distinguished guests. Getting anything done in Guatemala is difficult, much less anything comfortable.” Susana straightened out her skirt and brushed it off a little.
“You’ve all been assigned laboratories, though, and we have some pretty amazing equipment here, so we hope you’ll all be able to get on with your research as quickly as possible. In the meantime, let me run over what it is we do know about this disease, and then you can ask questions about all the things I probably don’t know, but that in the coming weeks we’ll hopefully be able to find out.”
Sarah looked around the room at the group and recognized a few well-known doctors: Dr Jill Myers from the CDC who she’d met at a conference once, and Sven Heinlein, a German researcher who she’d almost ended up in bed with on a number of occasions. A light flickered above them.
“We’re truly hoping we can all work together on this and come up with a solution to benefit everyone,” Susana went on. “With the world so splintered these days, it’s nice to find doctors and scientists from competing companies in the same room together. Let’s hope it’s a sign of things to come, of a new age of working together again as opposed to constantly working at odds with one another.”
Susana explained to them all the ways in which the disease was manifesting itself: the immune system attacking healthy cells resulting in fatigue, joint pain, rashes on the skin, lesions, and a lowered resistance to bacteria and viruses. Most of the patients were on immunosuppressants, but these resulted in even higher levels of susceptibility to infection or disease.
After the talk, Susana led them on a tour of the clinic. There were eight patients to a room, but Sarah was relieved to see that at least the patients had air-conditioning, bathrooms, and their beds were clean. Some of the patients looked healthy, but others were exhausted and sleeping. Any of them who had anything other than SAID had been quarantined.
“We’ve seen bacteria and viruses that haven’t been seen in twenty years,” Susana said. “Things like influenza and even cholera have been active.”
“How is cholera getting in here?” Sarah said.
“It isn’t. The subjects were infected before they arrived.”
“Are all the test subjects here now?”
“Most of them, yes.”
“How many aren’t?”
“Around two hundred. Four percent. We just don’t have space for all of them.”
“Don’t you think you should find space?”
“We’re working on it, trust me.”
Trusting Susana was the last thing Sarah was inclined to do. She seemed like the typical corporate slave who mouthed thoughtlessly the ethos of the corporation she’d become enslaved to. No doubt back home, wherever that was, she lived in a protected enclave, visited the corp owned resorts and sent her kids to corp-owned schools. Once you were in that rut, it was hard to get out of. Sarah knew. Before Derek had died, she’d been doing exactly the same thing herself.
That afternoon, Sarah was shown to the lab that had been assigned to her, and her first goal was to complete a full comparison of the genetic changes made to these patients compared with those originally coded by Dr Michael Khan—chief inventor of the Homo novus lineage. Given that none of those who had been modified with the original modifications were sick, the key to the problem obviously lay there.
She knew that Gronome and presumably many others had already been over this, but she needed to do it for herself. If only she had Dr Khan with her or even someone from his original team. She could have gotten her answers directly. All she had was access to their original annotations—listed out below each change they’d made to the original human genome. There was so much information there, though, years of research. Getting her head around it all was going to be almost impossible—especially given their timeframe. Why didn’t anyone have access to Michael himself? He was alive, after all, even if imprisoned. It just didn’t make sense.
CHAPTER TWO
SHY SAT IN his hotel room in the hotel in Guatemala that he’d come to with his mother and logged into his office in v-space. He’d designed it himself using a combination of tailor-made and off-the-shelf furniture and the view was ever changing—sometimes a futuristic city, sometimes a calming ocean, sometimes mountains with mist-filled forest. Today he had it set to a tropical beach scene, and he looked out across bright blue waters.
He put a call through to Salina, another Homo novus like himself who lived in this part of Guatemala. When his mother had told him she was coming here, he’d put a message up in Youtopia. Within a few hours, Salina had contacted him and they’d organized to meet.
Shy didn’t normally meet other Homo novus, even in his home city of Melbourne, except through Youtopia. But something had been stirring in him for months, if not years, and he thought it was about time he faced the outside world again. All throughout high school he’d been bullied for being different and ever since, he’d spent his entire existence in his bedroom jacked into v-space. At Youtopia he’d found a whole lot of people just like him: people who liked hugging one another. People who only ever wanted
to do nice things for other people and didn’t really care about themselves that much. Men who were happy to let women lead.
In high school he’d been called all sorts of names—a faggot, a weirdo, a loser, a sissy, a pussy. He couldn’t help it, though. If people came near him he had an almost uncontrollable urge to hug them or desire to have sex with them. In Youtopia this was fine—everyone hugged each other and had virtual sex with each other all the time—but in the rest of the world Shy had learned it was far from normal.
His mother had explained to him at a young age that he was different from other people, that he had been genetically modified with bonobo genes which made him a lot more friendly and affectionate than others. Over time, he’d slowly learned to control his urges, and now he could participate in the normal world occasionally, if only for short periods of time, and not without a great deal of physical and emotional frustration as he tried to keep himself in check.
But now he wanted more. He wanted to be able to participate in the real world. However good Youtopia was—and for Homo novus it was pretty close to perfect—he still longed to get out more and be part of a wider community.
So Guatemala, a completely new environment, where he knew nobody and nobody knew him, was a perfect stepping stone. And what better way than to meet up with another Homo novus, especially one as attractive as Salina, and have her show him around?
“Hi, it’s me. Shy,” he said, when Salina answered.
“Hi, Shy. Are you here yet?”
“Yes. We just got in. I’m at the hotel.”
“Okay, I’ll be there in a little while.”
“I’m in room 204.”
Half an hour later, there was a knock at Shy’s door. He went nervously over to open it. In Youtopia when people met one another they would often hug and kiss. Shy wondered if he was permitted the same liberty in the real world. He knew to control himself with Homo sapiens, but Salina was Homo novus, like him. When they had met in Youtopia they had greeted one another like that. They had even had sex with one another in one of Youtopia’s sex houses that were open twenty-four hours a day and usually filled with fiery Homo novus. But all his real world conditioning was now holding him back.
Connection Part I: A Dystopian Novel (Perfectible Animals Book 2) Page 1
