The New Reality

by Stephen Martino

  Just as the cylinder ran out of oxygen, the last necroid dropped to its death, creating a new pile of black debris for Samantha to avoid with her bare feet.

  Samantha had secured the bunker. With the external ventilation shafts cordoned off and the internal threat finally neutralized, she could finally return to her work. She threw down the oxygen canister and walked over to the autopsy room’s console, trying not to impale her sole on a frozen piece of necroid. With only a few minor scrapes, she began working once again. Business as usual.

  Fortunately, the necroids created no breach in the autopsy room. The sterile atmosphere inside remained intact as did her experiment. The victim’s body still lay in stasis under the sheer white blanket while two new holographic images of her body in a position reminiscent of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man flanked her sides.

  One of the images appeared to be aging rapidly. As each minute passed, it grew another year older while the other holograph remained the same.

  “This is unbelievable!” Samantha said, looking at the readouts on the console. “This explains everything!”

  She examined the results closely once again, paying careful attention to every detail.

  “I’ve got to tell Alex!”

  Chapter 26

  “Does anyone want something to drink?” Alex asked while standing behind the bar.

  William lounged on one of the Stratoskimmer’s couches, pleased to finally be out of harm’s way. They had been stuck at Megiddo for another four hours while the Israeli military reconnoitered the area. During that time, he had personally devoured the rest of Marissa’s protein bars and a few items in her bag that she didn’t think were even edible.

  It had been a harrowing experience. While they hid in the old Christian church, soldiers scoured the area, shooting at anything that moved. It was fortunate that they decided not to surrender, as most likely they would all have received a bullet in the chest rather than a friendly handshake. Despite all the commotion, Alex’s infrared disrupter hid them well.

  William turned to Marissa, “Maybe you could hook me up with an IV and run the alcohol directly into my veins. It’ll be quicker that way.”

  “I don’t think that’s sanitary,” Guri replied.

  “Try it anyway,” William responded as if it might seriously be a plausible idea.

  “I just wish we found something at Megiddo,” Jonathan interjected, still mentally browbeating himself for leaving the area empty-handed. He had barely been listening to the others since arriving in the Stratoskimmer as he continued to obsess about Megiddo. “I’m running out of time!”

  While the others did not seem to notice, Alex detected something odd about Jonathan’s last statement, I’m running out of time. The man was anything but impatient, and those words suggested that he might not be telling them everything he knew.

  Alex studied Jonathan, like a physician would a patient. Since their departure from Neurono-Tek the wrinkles on the man’s face did appear deeper and his overall appearance definitely looked gaunter than when they originally met. Though nothing struck him as being completely out of the norm, something seemed amiss.

  “Is everything alright?” Alex asked in an open-ended fashion.

  “Oh, yes,” Jonathan quickly replied. “I guess I just got all wrapped up in the excitement. That’s all.” He continued by lightly saying, “Old guys like me are supposed to be on the golf course, not hunted down with machine guns.”

  Alex gave him a subtle glance, suggesting he did not completely buy the answer. Jonathan didn’t offer any further information.

  A faint red image of Samantha appeared in the middle of the Stratoskimmer’s cabin. Lacking its usual crispness, the holograph looked faded and blurred. Unfortunately for all those aboard the ship, her shrill voice projected as loudly and clearly as usual.

  “What’s wrong with this telecommunicator?” she yelled. “Alex, are you trying to save money by purchasing junk?”

  Before anyone could answer, she went on a tirade about what had just occurred at Neurono-Tek. Meticulously informing them about the necroids, she finally ended the long story with, “And somebody owes me a pedicure.”

  “That was more exhausting than running away from those UAA guys with machine guns back at Megiddo,” William jested under his breath.

  Even Guri nodded in agreement.

  Alex then quickly briefed Samantha on their recent escapades. He knew that no matter what he had to say, Samantha would find it paled in excitement to what she had just experienced. He could have told her they met God, discovered the lost city of Atlantis, and created a simple method for cold fusion and she still wouldn’t have been impressed.

  “Well, you’re not going to believe what I discovered,” Samantha then announced. “While I was single-handedly defeating the necroids, I had a few experiments running in the autopsy room. You remember the Bergmann, I mean bcl-xl gene that the nebbishy guy Guri was talking about?”

  “I’m right here,” Guri tried to say, speaking with a weak and cracking voice.

  “Well, I ran the activated gene on a holographic copy of our victim here. And you know what happened?” she asked rhetorically. “All the tissue and organs in the virtual body deteriorated precisely as if it had been inflicted by The Disease.”

  “Did you use the lab’s chronographer?” asked Alex.

  Despite the poor quality of the image, they could all notice the annoyed look on her face. “No, I used my ass.” There was a short pause. “Of course I used the chronographer. How else could I’ve made the holographic copy of this victim age so quickly?”

  Alex took a swig of whisky and passed a similar bottle to Marissa. She welcomed the alcohol with open arms.

  “The bcl-xl gene seems to be the cause for The Disease.” Samantha went on to say. “That’s what’s been killing everyone around the world. It seems this gene activates a cascade of events, which eventually destroys the body’s mitochondria. And once they’re damaged, the body has no way of turning food into energy—so it eventually dies.”

  “That Guri really did a good job by finding it,” she then added sarcastically.

  Guri was too frightened to rebut her.

  “Not to burst your bubble,” Alex commented, “but did you figure out how this thing spreads?”

  “I’m not done yet!” she exclaimed. “Did you hear me stop talking yet?”

  Samantha was on a roll. The recent experience with the necroids had sent her personality into overdrive. Combined with the lack of sleep, she had become more manic than Alex had ever seen her.

  I definitely need to give her a long vacation after all this is over, Alex thought.

  “I also used the chronographer on an embryonic sample of the patient’s tissue,” Samantha said, assuming everyone followed her train of thought.

  “Embryonic sample?” Marissa politely questioned to disarm any fiery response.

  Samantha stopped a second. She knew she got ahead of everyone else, but her mind kept on racing. “The autopsy lab here has a special instrument whereby we can create a virtual one cell embryonic sample from any person’s tissue and run it through the chronographer. So it’s like taking the fertilized egg after the moment of conception and watching the entire aging process from zero to a hundred years in a matter of a few hours.”

  Neurono-Tek’s advanced technology certainly dwarfed that which Marissa had available at the NIH. She felt as if they had been using Stone Age technology the whole time in search of answers for The Disease. In fact, she had never even heard of a chronographer or a virtual embryonic cell maker. In one day, Neurono-Tek discovered more than the NIH could have ever accomplished in years.

  “So I activated the bcl-xl gene from conception in the victim’s embryonic sample and ran it to the age of 35 when she died,” Samantha went on to explain. She looked down at her console readings just one more time to assure herself of the results. “And you’re not going to believe what I discovered.”

  Out of all of them Guri was mos
t especially interested in hearing the results. After spending over five years of his life discovering the bcl-xl gene and witnessing the scourge it had caused throughout the world, he wanted at least some conclusion to his work.

  The New Reality had terminated his position the instant he delivered to them the gene. Legally banned from ever working on it again or divulging any of its information, he was left with many lingering questions.

  “Instead of killing her,” Samantha said, “it actually enhanced every part of her entire body. Just listen to this. Her muscle mass increased by 20%, her myocardial strength went up 18%, and the neural mass and supportive tissue in her brain increased by 24%. Do you know what this means?”

  “She’s still not as smart as you,” Alex said sarcastically.

  “That may be so,” she responded, taking the comment more as a compliment than a joke. “But the early activation of the gene made her stronger, faster, and have more endurance. Plus, I estimated her IQ increased by at least 30 points.”

  She stopped talking for a second and then reiterated, “30 points! That’s astounding!”

  Guri felt an intense sense of vindication with his work, despite its deadly outcome. Though a hollow victory, he knew what he discovered could potentially evolve humanity thousands of years into the future. With the added mental and physical capacity, limitless possibilities for mankind could be achieved much quicker than natural selection would allow.

  Food shortages, environmental changes, plagues, pestilence, and even war could become a thing of the past. Just as Alfred Nobel had been remembered for the Peace Prize, maybe one day Guri Bergmann would be memorialized as the person who helped humanity enter a golden age instead of the one who exterminated it.

  “Those results are unprecedented!” Marissa said. “It seems the embryonic cells were primed at a very early stage and instead of the bcl-xl gene destroying them, it actually enhanced their overall maturation. I can understand now what made those people in Guri’s research project be considered great. They were given a significant genetic advantage.”

  Marissa went on to think aloud, “I guess when an embryonic cell or a cell that has just been fertilized by a sperm has the bcl-xl gene activated, it is not toxic. Only when the cell matures does the bcl-xl gene and its protein become toxic. That’s why the activated gene killed everyone who acquired The Disease.”

  “Not to beat a dead horse,” Alex said cautiously, “or undermine the significance of your findings, but did you discover how this gene is transmitted or activated from one person to another?”

  Samantha gave an unusually succinct answer, “No.”

  Their enthusiasm was tempered by this realization. Millions were dying and they still had no clue how to stop the spread of The Disease.

  “Since we know the protein that’s toxic to the cells,” Marissa said, “I bet we can devise an infusion that could deactivate it or disrupt its transcription from DNA.”

  Samantha shook her head. “I wish that were so. It seems in my experiment here that the toxic effects of the bcl-xl protein to the mitochondria are almost instantaneous. Even though it may take months to manifest its effects, the damage is done within the first day or two. By the time anyone is showing evidence of The Disease, it’s too late.”

  “So where do we go from here?’ Marissa asked. “Does anyone have any ideas?”

  “It’s a retrovirus,” William said nonchalantly.

  Marissa turned to him, “What did you say?”

  “I said it’s a retrovirus. It seems obvious that’s the only answer.”

  “How do you know that?”

  William gave her a wink as if to say, I’m smarter than I look.

  Chapter 27

  Samantha stared at William’s holographic image. Like hers on the Stratoskimmer, it appeared red and fuzzy. Pieces of the necroids still smoldered throughout the bunker and the scratches on the autopsy room’s glass were reminders of the recent assault.

  “William?” Samantha encouraged.

  Alex introduced the two of them when she joined Neurono-Tek. Since then, they had collaborated on a few successful research projects and obtained one of the last NIH sponsored grants. Despite his slovenly ways, Samantha always respected his insight and found him to be a good resource for various projects she had pursued.

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he reiterated. “When you think of different means of human to human transmission of a disease, a retrovirus similar to the HIV virus is the only possibility.”

  “Why so?” Samantha asked.

  “First of all, how else could an activated bcl-xl gene get transmitted from one person to another? Second, it perfectly explains such a dramatic spread of The Disease.”

  “It’s been a long time since I took virology in college,” Guri interrupted with his nasal voice. Feeling responsible for the carnage created by his discovery, he did not want to miss any piece of information and hoped that by fully understanding the situation, he could help find a cure. “What exactly is a retrovirus?”

  Usually annoyed with Guri’s distractions, William instead seemed pleased to explain himself. Virology was his passion, and he enjoyed speaking as much on the subject as possible.

  “As you are already well aware of,” William said as if conducting class, “all of our genetic information is stored in what’s called Deoxyribonucleic Acid or DNA for short. Just about every cell in our entire body has its own copy, and it’s stored in a particular area called the nucleus. When a cell wants to make a protein, a designated portion of the DNA is copied into something called Ribonucleic acid, or RNA. The RNA is then transported out of the nucleus and is used by the cell as a blueprint to build a particular protein, such as the bcl-xl.”

  Guri nodded his head, acknowledging William’s explanation.

  “Instead of DNA, like in our cells,” William said, “a retrovirus is composed of RNA. When it infects a human, this RNA is copied into DNA and then is incorporated into one of the cell’s long strands of DNA in the nucleus. I’ve calculated that about 8% of our DNA originates from these viruses. Most of it is considered junk and unusable, but occasionally, these retroviruses have introduced something useful into the human genome.

  “Finally,” William said, “when the virus wants to reproduce, the DNA that was incorporated into the cell’s genome is copied back to the original viral RNA form. And if the virus infects another host or a different cell, the process begins once again.”

  “So you believe that when the bcl-xl gene was turned on during the experimentation on Astipalea, a latent retrovirus was accidentally activated?” Guri concluded.

  “Exactly!”

  “Samantha,” Alex said, “pull up a DNA profile of the victim and one of the control tissue samples there in the autopsy room. Let’s see what’s coded next to the bcl-xl gene in this DNA.”

  “Samantha, do this,” she complained. “Samantha, do that. Hasn’t your mother ever taught you words like please or thank you?”

  “Could you please pull up the DNA profiles?” Alex said, half-heartedly.

  “Now that’s a little better!”

  Samantha worked behind the console, scanning the DNA sequences from the two different samples. With the automated equipment in the autopsy room, the results returned almost instantaneously.

  “There’s no difference,” she said. “They’re both exactly the same.”

  Alex pulled a clear tablet from the wall and handed it to William. “Samantha, could you send over those DNA sequences to the Stratoskimmer on our secure line so we can have a closer look at it… please.”

  “Happy to oblige!”

  What appeared to be random letters of A, T, G, and C immediately scrolled down the screen. The letters were side by side in two strands with the A and T, and the G and C always paired together.

  “Thank you,” Alex said.

  Alex, Guri, and Marissa crowded around William. The letters meant nothing to them, but they all watched them scroll down the screen as if t
hey understood.

  The bcl-xl gene had been marked with a red color while the rest of the letters were in black.

  “You recognize anything?” Marissa asked.

  William tilted the tablet and ran his fingers over the letters so that they would enlarge or change direction in the way they scrolled. Satisfied as to what he’d seen, he handed the tablet back to Alex.

  “The bcl-xl gene,” William said matter-of-factly, “is smack-dab in the center of a retrovirus.”

  “You can tell that quickly?” Samantha commented.

  She did not want to appear condescending, but to make sense of the genetic code just by looking at a bunch of letters seemed impossible. It usually required a computer to decipher the letters into any meaningful data.

  “One of my interests has always been latent retroviruses in the human DNA,” he said. “As I mentioned before, 8% of our genetic code is comprised of these viruses. Through millions of years of evolution, their remnants have been mutated and spliced so many ways it’s difficult to identify them. However, I wrote a paper a few years back about eight retroviruses in the human genome that could potentially be reactivated once again.”

  “I assume that what you’re looking at right now is one of the eight?” Alex conjectured.

  The transmission in Samantha’s office suddenly flickered a few times and went dead.

  “Alex! Are you there!”

  “Yes,” he responded. “We’re all here. And screaming won’t bring our holographic picture back any quicker.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ever since we were hit by that magnetic blast our equipment has not been working completely right. We’ll just have to finish this conversation like they did in the twentieth century—audio only.”

  “Alex, you’re dead on,” William interrupted, not noticing the absence of a visual feed. “The bcl-xl is directly within one of the eight viruses. I immediately recognized the site on chromosome 17.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Marissa commented.

  “The bcl-xl gene,” William went on to say, “has coding regions for enzymes such as proteases, integrases, and structural proteins adjacent to it on the chromosome. It’s these exact enzymes that a virus needs to infect a cell and help it survive and reproduce. When the scientists on Astipalea went to turn on the bcl-xl gene they must have inadvertently activated the whole retrovirus.”