The Final Trade

by Joe Hart

  And the void within her flows outward, consuming everything it touches with a darkness she can’t outrun.

  12

  The fifth floor of the ARC is silent except for the faint whir of computers and the tap of a pen against a table. Vivian sits before her personal workstation reading through the files for at least the three hundredth time.

  They are like old, familiar friends now, so old and so familiar they’ve become enemies. She hates the text on the computer screen but cannot help being immersed in it, even now over twenty-five years after she first compiled the reports. She rubs her brow and scans the screen, knowing almost every word by heart.

  The Maclear’s rat’s (Rattus macleari) sudden decline and supposed extinction on Christmas Island is thought to have been caused by trypanosome, communicated by the accidental introduction of the common Black rat, or Rattus rattus. The last sighting of the species was in 1903.

  Vivian clicks a button and the screen flashes, bringing up the next document.

  The Thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus), more commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger, is estimated to have vanished from mainland Australia over 2,000 years ago. Its subsequent demise on the continent is thought to be partially due to lack of food. Extinction from the neighboring island of Tasmania occurred much later, with the last known example of the species captured in 1933 and dying in 1936. A number of factors, such as disease, hunting, and competition for food, are theorized to have driven the Thylacine into extinction.

  Vivian clicks to the next screen and barely reads one paragraph before looking away.

  Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) are thought to have become extinct from several causes, susceptibility to disease being a prime candidate, but another, widely recognized theory is that extinction was the result of violent conflict with more modern humans. In essence, their extermination is one of the first known examples of genocide.

  She drops the pen and stands, moving away from her workstation in the lab adjacent to the empty operating room and stops at the door. Across the hallway the soft pulse of light comes from the Axiom Monitor. Its ever-fluctuating luminance has always calmed her in ways nothing else can. There is something comforting in its constant motion, a shifting that reminds her of the constellations trading positions in the night sky. But even its serene colors can’t stop her from thinking about the endless streams of information she’s pored over time after time.

  Disease. Genocide. Extinction.

  All the terms come down to the same thing. Weakness.

  You can’t fight nature, Vivian.

  She grimaces when her college professor’s voice echoes in her ears as if he’s standing right behind her. He’s been dead for the better part of thirty years, but his haughty authority still haunts her.

  Dr. Oren Manning had been an odd fixture at Purdue during her time there. The only head of the biomedical and genetic engineering program who had ever believed that there were limits to science. Natural limits were in place for a reason, he insisted, and the leaps and bounds being made in the field of genetic engineering meant science was evolving faster than human beings were prepared for. He had repeatedly said mankind’s egotism would be its undoing in the face of nature.

  She leaves Manning’s words behind and travels down the hallway to the elevator doors. She turns left and finally stops at the room where Zoey had Tasered her and left her locked inside with Carter’s corpse.

  Weakness. Maybe the same term applies to them all. But no, weakness wasn’t the reason Zoey was able to escape; it was stupidity and arrogance on their part. They’d operated so long under the assurance that no person could ever break out of this place, that it was unthinkable with the safeguards they’d developed, both physical and mental. That all of the women would abide without question and never contemplate escape.

  Yet Zoey had done it.

  Not only escaped, but had brazenly returned and taken the remaining subjects with her. It was the last thing they imagined she would do.

  Vivian glances down the corridor at the row of doors. All of the rooms, at one time, held the parents of the girls who grew up in the levels below. Zoey accused her of lying, and she has to admit she hasn’t been fully honest in all her years at the ARC. But at one point the women’s parents had been here—that was the truth.

  The fact was, they’d been weak.

  She recalls the bitter disappointment of conducting test after test in the early days of the ARC. The rigorous screening of both parents. How every woman who had given birth to a girl failed to do so again. Time after time, embryo after embryo, all male, no matter how perfect the conditions their scientists created or the genetic modifications they used.

  She had told Zoey they didn’t understand why the Dearth had occurred, but that was a lie. They’ve known the truth for many years now.

  A single gene had been the cause, one so innocuous no one would’ve ever considered it a threat to humankind.

  The SRY gene, which is typically encoded on a Y chromosome and helps develop male sexual organs, was the problem.

  It took some time after NOA was formed before their research determined that the SRY gene was present on the Y and X chromosomes in the sperm samples they’d collected. Not a translocation of the gene, but a duplication. And the largest problem of all was that the duplication was encoded in every one of their test subjects.

  Vivian remembers the heated early meetings. Scientists and doctors shouting over one another, screaming about the impossibility of it all, while every one of them knew what the repetitive data meant. Without intervention, every child, even those born with two X chromosomes, would be male.

  Theories were espoused about the cause of the phenomenon itself. Pollution. Overpopulation. Lack of essential nutrients in the soil and in food. A genetic mutation. The degeneration of the Y chromosome. David Pilcher’s theory of genome corruption. But no single source was ever proven. Perhaps it had been a combination of them all. Maybe it was nature’s final slap to the face; extinction through complete maleness. A domination ironically fitting when compared to men’s conquering of the world. But what did it matter really? The genie was already out of the bottle, as her father used to say. So instead they began working on a solution.

  Dr. Raj Chaudhri, the newly appointed lead scientist of NOA, was the first to propose the simplest remedy. Remove the SRY gene from the X chromosomes either before or after conception. And everyone had agreed. It was something a first-year genetics student would’ve suggested.

  But that’s where things hit a roadblock.

  The gene editing they attempted had been used almost exclusively in mice up until that point. The Chinese had conducted human experiments years before and reported several problems, but the scientists within the National Obstetric Alliance were the absolute best in the world and went forward without hesitation.

  The results were catastrophic.

  The method commonly used and trusted in non-human experiments cut unintended genes, which resulted in unacceptable consequences. And when they finally managed to successfully delete SRY, replacing functional DNA over the gap along with the other genes that were affected, the strand breaks created frameshift mutations. The mutations in turn caused innumerable developmental problems in the embryos, ranging from sterility to several debilitating syndromes. In short, the children born would have had very brief and painful lives.

  She still remembers the stunned silence in the lab after yet another failed attempt, their former gusto and confidence dimmed almost to nothing. Chaudhri had settled slowly onto a stool, his deep brown eyes hazy as he stared at the floor.

  “It’s like nature decided to flip a switch and shut humankind off,” he said quietly.

  The next day Chaudhri resigned and Vivian took over as lead scientist. She recalls her disdain of Chaudhri’s defeatism, the exhilaration of being in charge, of having unlimited resources at her disposal, the challenge of discovery on the horizon even as reports came in that several nuclear weapons had been
launched in the Middle East and Russia. Despite the looming destruction, she held on to hope. But soon thereafter it faded.

  Her team went on to attempt more than a thousand trials, but all failed in one way or another. The failures shouldn’t have happened. Not any more than the SRY gene should’ve been duplicated on the X chromosomes. But they did. The best and brightest minds in the world were just as dumbstruck and helpless about their experiments’ lack of success as they were when postulating why molecular evolution had become an epidemic. Even the men who had previously fathered healthy baby girls were affected, their once normal sperm now altered with the same duplication as the rest of the population.

  By the time Vivian realized that their last hope might be combining preserved sperm and eggs from before the Dearth, the rebels had started assaulting their stronghold adjacent to the president’s location outside Washington, D.C.

  Days later, the atomic weapon detonated, killing the president and many top cabinet members, not to mention thousands of innocent women and children.

  Vivian closes her eyes, still able to feel the shudder and violent pitch of the NOA lab as the building shifted on its foundations. They’d had no choice but to evacuate to the ARC, leaving behind the frozen sperm and embryos along with any prospect of finding an escape from the extinction barreling toward them like a freight train.

  It took years after that to locate the girls that used to live in the levels below her now—the last female children born in the Dearth, their eggs still holding reproductive promise. But their inductions became a series of empty hopes just as before. Male embryos, one after the other. After taking as many of their eggs as she could for possible future testing, she discarded the women to the Fae Trade. Because now she had an entirely new take on how to reverse the Dearth, and when aligned with her theory the inducted women weren’t of any use to her, their genetics weak and yielding.

  And weakness isn’t a part of the future. There is no place for it.

  One of Manning’s speeches comes out of the darkness of memory, one that’s surfaced hundreds of times over the years since she came to this place to continue her work.

  It may not be today, or tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, but in time the discovery that you think is a miracle in one moment may become a disaster in the next. Now, it is not to say there will not be forward motion in scientific medicine or that we won’t be able to help people with our research. I’m saying I believe, on a cellular level, we cannot ever begin to understand the enigmatic causes and effects of diseases that are older than time. We may think we do, but just when we type the last period on a thesis, some hidden or unexplainable fact will surface that destroys all prior logic and reason. This is why a cause for autism cannot be thoroughly explained. This is why we have not beaten cancer. We are swimming, not in a definable pool, but in an ocean that is greater than our comprehension.

  At the worst of times she and many of her classmates considered Manning a defeatist, at the best a smug Pantheist.

  But the bottom line is he was right.

  She had realized it after rising up through NOA, outworking and outthinking almost every man and woman in the organization.

  The keystone.

  She’d developed the theory after taking control of the research helm from Chaudhri, after watching the gene deletion fail miserably. It was then that Manning’s voice had begun to whisper in her ear, telling her that nature governed itself and that if she was patient and observant enough, she would find the answer.

  And now she has.

  The elevator doors open at the end of the corridor, shocking her back from the past. Reaper steps out and spots her, stopping several feet away. His shoulders are rounded and there’s dust and sand speckling his clothes and hair as well as the mask that covers his injury. He has become more and more withdrawn as of late, his mood dour, their interactions strained as if something unsaid hangs between them.

  “So? Did you find the team?” she asks when he says nothing.

  He sighs and nods. “Sixty miles south. They were ambushed. Some kind of modified explosive device in the road. Fulton and Arnold were killed first but Garrety managed to get away from the road before they caught him.”

  “And?”

  “Looks like he died from blood loss. Gunshot to the thigh.”

  “Was it one of them?”

  He shifts back and forth as if so weary he can’t stand. “I don’t know. There were three sets of larger tracks and one smaller.”

  Vivian chews her lower lip. “I think it’s time to send out the scouts.”

  “Are the arms ready? Have they been tested properly?”

  “We can’t wait any longer.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  He nods, his eyes holding hard on hers, and she thinks he’s about to finally say what she’s sensed building in him over the past months, but the sound of the door opening behind her breaks the moment. They face the figure that walks in their direction, giving them each a cold smile.

  Vivian tries to return it and fails. “Hello, Director.”

  13

  Wen gazes up at the faultless night sky and drinks in the starlight.

  She stands at the eastern border of the camp outside the last ring of tents. The desert beyond is a mixture of basins and plateaus rising up in indistinct shapes like stalking animals beyond the edge of firelight. The land is slowly changing with each day’s travel, the flat scrubland growing less prominent, while the scattered mountains in the west become bolder. The trade doesn’t so much drive as it trundles. It is a giant, ungainly creature growling down forgotten highways, portions of it lagging and stretching for miles, but always coming back together to form a protective circle around itself by nightfall.

  A guard stalks by in the darkness, the scuff of his boots the loudest sound besides the faint hum of the generators. He merely glances at her, continuing on his rounds, another shape of a man moving forty yards behind him, their circling of the camp endless, tireless since there is always another man to replace one that’s going off shift.

  She glances up into the sky again.

  The stars have always captivated her. When she was too young to know better she dreamed of traveling to one, seeing its burning aura up close. This was before she understood that the sun was a star and that traveling to the next closest one would take hundreds of lifetimes. But her father had set her straight on that account.

  There’s no way you’ll ever be an astronaut, he’d told her after taking another long pull from the bottle he held. You don’t have the brains for it, number one. And number two, they’ll be shutting that NASA shithole down soon enough anyways. Everyone’s got their eyes stuck on shit that’s unreachable instead of dealing with the problems right in front of us.

  The line between being practical and being a bastard is thin. And she knows which side her father fell on.

  Wen tears her eyes away from the glittering heavens and searches the charcoal land beyond, giving in to practicality herself. The scavenging crew should’ve returned by now. Robbie, Fitz, and the rest had left before dawn that morning, the quiet rumble of their convoy waking her out of a dead sleep. She hates the days Robbie is gone, and yearns for them at the same time. Maybe he’ll find it today. Maybe in three. Maybe never. Maybe she should quit hoping.

  A streaking movement above catches her eye and she looks up in time to see the phosphoric trail of a meteor flare across the horizon. The memory of making a wish rises and falls away. There’s no time for wishing now. Not in this world. Her father would be proud.

  She’s about to turn back from the edge of camp when an odor assaults her and she has half a second to process what it is before hands wrap tight around her arms and yank her behind the closest tent. Wen stumbles, regains her balance, and spins toward him.

  Vidri is a darker shadow before her like the plateaus and buttes in the distance. Besides his body odor she smells the strong liquor that several of the guards distill in the
ir tents, something between gin and sour wine.

  “What are you doing?” she asks, glancing around. They are completely concealed from the guard’s rounds between two tents; a low pile of equipment is stacked at one end of the alley. She’s not sure she can leap over it if she flees.

  “Came to talk to you. Looked everywhere. You’re a hard woman to find.” This strikes him as funny and he wheezes out a long laugh.

  “Yeah, well, I was just heading back to my tent.” She tries to shoulder past him but he latches onto her again, shoving her back.

  “Hold on, sweets. There’s no hurry. No one to cook for at this time of night. Ma and Pa are curled up in their nest and everyone’s fed. You got time.” Now she can see the shine in his eyes that isn’t a reflection of starlight. “Whatcha doing out so far anyways? Waiting for your weird little helper?”

  She tries to shove past him again and this time he catches her and brings her in close, pulling her against him so that his face is inches from hers. “Someday that whelp’s not going to come back from scavenging, you know that, right? He’ll piss off the wrong guy out there and get shot in the head and left for the birds and bugs.” She struggles against him, keeping silent, not willing to give him the satisfaction of letting him hear how afraid she is. There is no one close by to yell to and she’s sure Vidri wouldn’t let her scream go on for more than a second.

  He nuzzles her neck, untrimmed whiskers sharp and scratching. “Listen,” she says, trying to drink in air that he hasn’t contaminated. “You need to let me go. If either of the Prestons hear about this—”

  “Oh sweets. They know how much I like you. In fact, that’s why I was trying to find you. They finally caved. You’ll be bunking with me tomorrow night.” His tongue flashes out and slicks the side of her neck with saliva. Her skin crawls. A weapon, she needs something to hit him with. She’d still be in her right if she defended herself now. God, why didn’t she think to bring the crochet hook? She leans away from him, shuffling her feet to see if she can feel anything beneath her shoes she can use, but there’s nothing but the scratch of dirt and pebbles.