contact with the Earth, an orbital biodome to house 400 of the world’s greatest minds.
And that’s where my part in the story begins. I’m not dumb; I think I might have cracked the world’s million brightest, but Avalon was never in my cards. Sharen was. I used to tease her about training in classical physics. The world didn’t prize theorists, the money had been in weaponeering for a decade, so the field was choked with weaponeers. I don’t know that I could have loved her the same if she built better bombs; I do know she would never have had a place on Avalon.
For years, the earth shook, as man fought over oil, water, food. During those same years, Avalon toiled in the name of a better future. I spent that time corresponding with Sharen. She had been distant since she graduated, always lost in some research; our distance now at least added pretext.
I never told her about the engineering I took, or the journeyman jobs I did, all with an eye to the sky. I told myself I was doing it for me, that it was about following a life’s dream- but I was never good at lying, least of all to myself.
And finally, I got my assignment. I sent Sharen a message right before I boarded the space climber. When I got to my apartment on Avalon (really a glorified mop closet- the original designs hadn’t planned for support staff), there was a message waiting from her. It was both ecstatic and dour- and she wanted to see me for lunch. I was excited and terrified, uncertain what my future held.
I never got to find out. I was sent out that morning in a small experimental ship on a bit of minor maintenance on the hull, patching a few dents caused by debris collisions. An explosion inside Avalon knocked me loose from the hull. I fired my thrusters, but the station had been knocked from its stable orbit, falling faster than I could match. Over hours, the station drifted into the atmosphere. Avalon was never designed for reentry; the stress caused the station to break in half, sparking another explosion. Half of the station continued deeper into the atmosphere, where it burnt up; the other half was splashed across the sky in pieces.
Governmental reports were uncertain. It could have been terrorism, a quiet act of war, or the product of the fledgling Chinese or Japanese space programs taking on more than they could handle on their sections of Avalon (and although no one dared point a finger at the American, European or Russian programs, we remembered their flaws, too).
The ship I was in had been designed as a microcosm of the station; algae tanks scrubbed the carbon dioxide from my air, and a water system cleaned waste water for reuse. Nutrients from shed skin, sweat, waste, all were combined with excess algae into a paste that would keep me alive. I was unaware of these features when Avalon crashed. I drifted aimlessly for a week without realizing it, only to find that I had not died of dehydration, and was not hungry, either. The ship was built for deep space research and exploration. It ran on thrusters powered by solar panels. In one of its clawed arms was an electron microscope. Housed in its belly was a chromatograph.
There’s a great cloud of debris from Avalon, most of it dust particles- spanning a distance nearly the same as the moon’s perigee. I’ve spent years now, sifting through the wreckage, collecting Sharen’s cremated remains. There are on the order of 50 trillion cells in the human body. I’m not sure what I’ll do when I’m finished; I don’t know that her parents would want a second funeral- perhaps I could spread her ashes across the sky, a new constellation amongst the stars. But that’s a question I’m not ready for, and I have work to get back to.
Table of Contents
Frankenstein Modern
My research would never have progressed without the Bush administration (I may be the only scientist in North America who could say that). Hurricane Katrina killed thousands in a very short span of time. It might have been a humanitarian crisis, but for an entrepreneurial researcher (with a boat) it was, we’ll call it, an opportunity.
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. My fascination came in early childhood. My mother died from breast cancer, an entire body lost for a single defect, the kingdom lost for a nail. My father was not a kind man; the thought of a life alone with him seemed more than I could bear. I was alone with her when she passed; by the time my father arrived home from the hospital, I was nearly done sawing through her skull (no small feat, without a proper bone saw). He beat me mercilessly, but it wasn’t the first time for that. Or the last. He was also the man who changed our family name the day he arrived from Germany to Frankenburger; I changed mine back the day after I graduated from Johns Hopkins.
Most of the materials I gathered came from the Jenson family. I don’t know them, personally, but their home, and the fact that they stayed through the storm indicate they were poor. The family died of a combination of drowning-related complications. There are three basic ways to die from drowning: during the initial submersion, pulmonary edema from water trapped in the lower airway passages obstructing red blood cell oxygenation (sometimes called the secondary or parking lot drowning, because it happens potentially hours later, in the parking lot as you leave), complications of emesis during resuscitation (it’s a fair bet that most patients vomit after nearly drowning, and vomitus in the lungs can lead to drowning, infection, or if it is highly acidic enough, destruction of the lung tissue). And of course, there’s always carbon dioxide poisoning the heart.
Tragic though the fate of the Jensons was, their manners of expiration meant that, medically speaking, I’d arrived mere moments after their death. Their organs were pristine. I loaded their corpses onto my boat, and took them to my laboratory.
The human pancreas is the fussiest; within 4 to 6 hours the organ will become nonviable if not removed. I chose the youngest Jenson, who I named Jenny; she was perhaps twenty, pretty, if slightly overweight, but the youth of the organ was key. Next was the heart, but while carving out Jenny’s pancreas, I noticed her lungs were black already- a heavy smoker for a girl so young. I decided to risk taking the heart from Janny, likely Jenny’s mother, or aunt, slightly larger, but not obese, along with the lungs and several of the major arterial pathways (en-bloc, as it’s medically known). The liver has the longest expected lifespan, so that I removed last from Jenny, along with the spleen, stomach and kidneys en bloc. Preserving organ system integrity has been shown to increase organ life span, as well as ease the reintegration of organs into the patient. I preserved them in Histidine-Tryptophan-Ketogluterate (HTK), which had only recently surpassed the more viscous UW lactobionate, and added the delta opioid ligand DADLE- which causes organs to go into a suspended animation not unlike hibernation.
I readily admit, time being of the essence, that when it came to tissues, muscles, bones, tendons and skin, I did not apply the same surgically gentile techniques. Having a family of bodies to choose from, I hacked them to separable, preservable pieces, often doing the majority of the work with a cleaver. It was inarticulate, to be sure, but while tissue is easy enough to obtain, I knew that whole organ systems were a rarity indeed.
At which point I collapsed. I had been alert for nearly forty hours at that point. I slept only an hour and a half. I had not time to spare; even with HTK and DADLE, I was perilously close to ruining one or more organ systems, and I was keenly aware how unique this opportunity was. Truth be told, my experiment hinged on the participation of one man. He was homeless, and dying a slow death from Alzheimer’s. He no longer recalled who he was. To honor the family’s memory, I decided to call him Jenson.
I took a low dose of dextroamphetamine and started the implantation process. The combination of the HTK and DADLE meant that most of the organ systems would last at least forty hours; however, most single-organ transplant surgeries can take around four, multiorgan transplantation can take up to 8, so I was forced to improvise. I placed Jenson’s brain on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, and gave him IV heparin and a cocktail of immunosuppressants. The heart I laid gently inside the chest cavity, without sewing it into the chest wall. I took similar shortcuts throughout the systems, trusting that the paralytics and Jenson’s immobility would keep
him from damaging his new organs, focusing instead on restoring connections between organ systems and the blood stream.
At 37 hours, I finished my task. I spent a half an hour rechecking every major artery and vein. I removed him from bypass, and shocked the heart. For a moment, neither of us breathed. Then his heart convulsed, and Jenson gasped.
I harvested bone marrow from the hips of all five Jensons, and injected these into the new Jenson’s blood stream; with a little luck, the chemo had cleared enough of a path for the marrow to gain a foothold. I slept fitfully, and woke after three hours more. I sewed the various organs in place using biodegradable sutures. Jenson was nearly brain-dead, but his vitals remained strong. He continued on a steady regimen of anticoagulants and immunosuppressants. Over the next several days I began reconstructing Jenson. I started with the legs. Jenny’s legs were not strong enough, and Janny had a slight disparity with leg lengths. Far stronger, both in musculature and in bone density, were her husband Jonny’s legs. I also used Jonny’s arms, shoulders, and hips, but with these I took my time, letting days melt into weeks and months. Jenson’s body was mending
Selected Short Stories Featuring Cry Wolf Page 4
