Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) (18 page)

“And did you?” She looked at me.
 

I looked sheepishly down.
 

“He did,” Dylan said. “We became a regular little family for a while there.”
 

“Why haven’t you ever told me about this?” Annie asked me.
 

“It was a long time ago.”

“Long time ago or not. Don’t you think that’s the sort of thing you might like to tell your wife?”

“You always seemed so against that sort of thing that I didn’t want to bring it up.”

“I’m not against that sort of thing at all. You’re making me out to be some kind of prude. I didn’t complain for example when you and Sophie here almost slept with one another at that gathering you went to, did I?” Annie pulled away from Sophie and sat with her back tight against the sofa like a cornered animal.
 

I felt paralyzed. I wanted to go across to Annie and put my arm around her, but the weed was making everything weirder than it already was. It was like all of us had stopped breathing and there was some poisonous gas in the air that was going to kill us if we did breathe.
 

“Come on, you’ve never done anything like that?” Dylan said to Annie, breaking the tension.
 

“No, never!” Annie said. “It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t, though. Or that I’m against it in any way.”
 

“You seem like a fairly liberal woman. I’m sure you got up to some pretty crazy things in your younger years,” Dylan said, and I admired the way he was bringing her out of herself, relaxing her.
 

“Well, there were a few things, I suppose, that looking back on did seem a little crazy.” Annie laughed, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
 

“Such as?” Sophie prodded.

“Well, nothing like that, of course.” She was still looking at me in a way which frightened me. Like she didn’t know me any more. Maybe it was just the pot. “I did steal a car once.”

“What!” I said, trying to act outraged.
 

“Tell us more,” Dylan said.
 

“Well, not exactly stole. It was my friend’s car.” Annie went on to tell us a story, about how they’d driven it across town when they were only fourteen and picked up two boys.
 

“You little rebel,” Dylan said. “At least we were of age, weren’t we, Michael?”
 

We all laughed, and I felt a warm glow of love stretch out for this, my only family.

Just before dinner, I followed Annie into our room as she went looking for a sweater.
 

“So, are you enjoying yourself?” I asked.
 

“Yes, I am, actually.”

“I’m sorry about all that back there. I should have told you years ago. It was just one of those things that I was kind of embarrassed about, and then as time went by it became harder and harder, and then I kind of forgot about it.”

“Forgot about it, or put it out of your mind?”

“The latter, I guess.”

“Is it still something you’re interested in doing? Dylan and Sophie look like they’re up for it.” She giggled.

“Not really. You?”

“No, probably not,” she agreed, and then we both laughed and hugged each other with what felt like relief. “Maybe I am a bit of a prude.”

“I like you being a prude,” I said, and we kissed.
 

The night was warm and a breeze blew off the ocean. We sat amongst a couple of hundred people around a large circular space where people were dancing, drumming, clapping with sticks or their hands, playing tambourines, triangles, flutes and recorders, or just adding to the general cacophony with their voices. After a few more cups of Kava and another couple of joints, I felt myself getting swept up in the euphoria and started clapping along myself.
 

Slowly, the party died down and people started huddling together in groups or going off together through the trees, and Annie and I walked along the dusty road together in the moonlight, leaning against one another and just enjoying for once the beauty of the moment.
 

The next afternoon we went back to visit Putuk, and he informed us that the people had agreed to let the monkeys free. There weren’t any natural predators on the island, and the monkeys would be able to live a happy life amongst the trees of the island, which provided plenty of wild fruit.
 

Before we left the island, we went to visit them. They were feeding noisily in a wild mango tree. Toby came running across to us and climbed up onto my shoulder. I took him down and held him tightly in my arms.

“You’re going to be okay here, Tobes,” I said to him. “You’re going to be happy. We’ll come back and visit you soon. I promise.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

OVER THE NEXT few days, we monitored Annie carefully, but nothing changed.
 

And then I had to return to the base.
 

Annie came out to the airport with me and we gave each other a painful goodbye.
 

“Let me know the second anything changes,” I said. “I’ll come back immediately.”
 

“I’ll be fine,” she replied, but her smile was forced and I let her go with a heavy heart.
 

That evening I went to find Justin. He was still in his lab, working on testing the immune systems of our patients to the Rebola virus. Thanks to the latest
in vitro
assay technology, we were able to do the testing outside the human body with a ninety percent certainty.
 

“How is Annie?” Justin burst out. I had sent him an encrypted message letting him know that we’d started testing the bio-vectors.
 

“No change, yet.”
 

“Penny’s in hospital. I really don’t think she has long left.”

“I’ll let you know as soon as anything changes.”

“Thanks,” he said.
 

“How is everything going here?”
 

“The results vary. Some of them seem to be working perfectly, while others are not working at all.” He went on to explain to me the reasons why. We had managed to increase the number and variety of antibodies, but in some cases the attack by the natural killer cells still wasn’t fast enough. And with Rebola, that was crucial.
 

Three days later, just as I was sitting over a plate of rice and vegetables after hardly eating all day, I got a call from Annie.
 

“Michael, something’s wrong.”
 

“What? What is it?” I almost choked on my food.
 

“I don’t know. I’m having some kind of a reaction to the new cells.”
 

“Where are you?”
 

“I’m at the clinic.”

I stood up and left my plate where it was, heading for the lab to find Justin.
 

“Okay, listen,” I said as I ran. “Send me all the test results once you’ve got them. I’ll go over them and we’ll see what’s wrong.”

“Okay.”
 

“Good. Just hold on. You’re going to be fine.”
 

Justin was in the lab, where I knew he’d be, working with a number of other people. I was in such a panic it was hard to focus. My heart rate, according to my com, was over a hundred.
 

“Annie’s having a negative reaction to the bio-vectors,” I whispered to Justin.
 

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Come with me.”
 

We went into my office and accessed the results that Annie had just sent me. Thankfully she’d been at the clinic where they had an AutoAnalyzer.
 

“It looks like the engineered T-cells are killing too many cells too rapidly,” I said. “She’s having a shock response.”
 

“How is that possible? Our trials with the macaques were perfect.”

“I have no idea, but we have to stop it.”

“We should give it another day. It might just be a period of adjustment.”

“My wife could die.” I knew that Justin was even more desperate for this to work than I was.

“If we don’t get this to work, Penny is going to die.” Justin stood there and shook his head.
 

I held onto him for a few moments, but then I needed to call Annie. Justin slumped down into the chair.
 

On the third ring, Annie answered and I could hear the panic but also the exhaustion in her voice.
 

“What should I do, Michael?”

“You’re going to have to disable the new genes as we discussed.”

“So that’s it, then? It’s not going to work?”
 

“No.” I was frightened but angry too. Angry at myself. Angry at life itself for allowing this to happen. Then I realized how irrational that was and my mind started working away on other possible solutions, my heart racing and my chest tight as I wondered what to do next. This couldn’t be the end of it. There was no way. Maybe if we could germline modify some children as we were trying to do before the military bought us out then we could use them to culture natural killer cells and also clone out genes for antibodies which would recognize HIV-4 more quickly. But that was going to take years.
 

“What are we going to do now, then?” Annie said.
 

“I don’t know.”

“I’d better go. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

“Is there anyone there with you?”

“Yes. Simone and Derek are here.”
 

“Okay, let me know as soon as anything changes.”

“I will. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Twenty minutes later, the longest twenty minutes of my life, Annie called me back and told me they had administered the failsafe inducer. It would be hours before we knew what the outcome would be. I wanted to be there with her, but by the time I got there it would all be over: for better or for worse.
 

I went back to my room, and Annie and I spent the next few hours talking to one another. Neither wanted to hang up, in case it was the last conversation we had. I felt as if by staying on the line with her I was somehow keeping her alive.
 

Around 3am, she told me that Derek had come in to run some more tests on her. Half an hour later she called again and told me it appeared they’d gotten to her in time. The chemical trigger had shut down the new genes, and her immune system was starting to function normally again.
 

The only problem was: normal wasn’t enough to cure her.
 

The next day I watched a report on the Indonesian situation. Indonesian troops were moving into the north of Australia. The military was there trying to stop more boats from landing, but there were too many of them and the area was too large.
 

Would the Indonesians really go to the extent of releasing the virus? It would be the end of civilization as we knew it. The start of a whole new era of total mistrust between countries and territories. It was almost inevitable, though. There simply wasn’t enough food left to feed everybody. People were going to die. Lots of people. It was only a matter of who.
 

One night, around 3am, I heard a soft knock on my door and got up quickly to open it. Justin was standing there with his nose red and his eyes bloodshot.

“What’s wrong?”

“Penny died,” he said.
 

I put my arms around him and pulled him to me while he cried. Then I invited him in and he spent the night telling me all about their childhood together, how she’d always been the strong one and had stood up for him in school. They hadn’t seen each other much in the last few years, as he had been so busy trying to find a cure for her.

The following day Justin left for the city to be with his family. I told him to take as long as he wanted, but he told me he’d be back by the end of the week. Penny was the only member of his family he really loved.
 

We continued our testing of the immune systems of the prisoners but the results still weren’t conclusive.
 

“How are things going?” Savage came into the lab one afternoon.
 

“From everything we can gather, it seems all bar two of our test subjects would survive the virus,” Kate said.
 

“What does that mean?” Savage said.

“It means that some people’s systems respond better to the modifications than others’. We’re trying to work out what the factors are, but it could take us weeks if not months. This is the human body we’re dealing with here, not some kind of mechanical toy.”
 

“So what are our options? Modify all our men and hope for the best, knowing that there’s a chance twenty percent of them will die?”

“With such a small sample size it’s impossible to know what the overall result is going to be,” Kate said. “You can’t just snap your fingers and make this stuff work, you know?”
 

“Well, I guess it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing.” Savage smiled in a way that didn’t mean he thought this was funny.

Over the next few weeks we made some minor adjustments to our modifications and conducted more tests on them. Things improved, but still weren’t perfect, so we adjusted again until eventually we decided we were about as close as we were going to get.

More and more reports came in about the Indonesian invasion of northern Australia. It wasn’t only Australia they were attacking — they’d already taken over parts of Malaysia and Thailand too. And this only added to all the other wars that were already going on around the world. The company that now owned most of California, Glocome, was invading Mexico and Guatemala, and a Japanese multinational had recently declared war on south eastern Brazil, which was now its own territory run by a right-wing dictator. England and France were under attack by a North African alliance, and eastern Europe was slowly being eaten up by the Middle East. Apart from that, in almost every country, civil wars were raging, or gangs were fighting other gangs for what remained of resources.