Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) (5 page)

“We’re going to have to get you to the hospital.”

“No, I’ll be fine,” she said.
 

“You won’t be fine. Now come on, get up and I’ll take you to the Royal Melbourne.”

Royal Melbourne hospital was a fifteen minute drive away. It had been privatized since the flooding, but at least it was still open.
 

“No, please. Let’s wait until morning at least. Just bring me some aspirin.”
 

“You don’t even know what you’ve got.”

I headed down to the kitchen. Washed out moonlight through the kitchen window was enough to see by and I took a glass from the dish rack and filled it with water. My hands shook. I thought about calling an ambulance but realized it was unnecessary. Why was it that at work I could be completely rational but when it came to Annie all reason and control left me?
 

“Here, take these.” I propped Annie’s head up under a few pillows and she managed to turn to one side. I fed the pills into her mouth and held the rim of the glass up to her lips. I put a towel down on the bed and made her roll over onto it. I checked her temperature, which was at forty degrees celsius, and I told her that if it got any higher I was going to take her to the hospital whether she liked it or not.
 

For the next few hours she fell in and out of consciousness and each time she came to I felt a sense of relief. The rest of the time I sat there in the dim light of the lamp, mopping sweat from her forehead and checking her temperature. I put one towel under her and another on top of her, but even those needed changing regularly.
 

“We need an IV drip. You’re losing too much fluid,” I said in one of her lucid moments, but then she blacked out again.

“I have some very bad news,” the doctor said when we ran some tests on her later that day.
 

“What is it?” Annie said.

“You have HIV-4.”

With global warming, mosquitoes had thrived, spreading to many new regions, even regulated sections of the developed world. Unlike HIV-1 and HIV-2, HIV-4 was very stable, stable enough to persist in the mosquito mouthparts and infect the next human the mosquito bit.
 

Annie turned to me and gripped me tightly, burrowing her nails into my skin.
 

I put my hand on her back. The world around me dissolved and I felt faint.
 

“What can we do?” I asked the doctor.

“Nothing,” Annie said to me. “There’s nothing we can do.”
 

“We’ll have to put her on retrovirals so you don’t contract it too,” the doctor said.
 

“I’ll sell the company,” I said to Annie that night, referring to the small biotech I had founded a few years earlier. “Geneus will probably buy us out. I’ll sell on the condition they’ll support me in doing some immune system research. We’ll find a cure for this.”
 

At that moment in our lives, despite the global catastrophe going on around us, Annie and I were at the peak of our careers. Annie was working at St Vincent’s Hospital as a doctor and I had just developed an artificial chromosome that could be programmed with any number of genetic modifications and inserted into the DNA of a fertilized egg. Just a few months before, a company called Geneus had offered to buy me out.
 

“You can’t do that,” Annie said. “That company’s your life.”

“You’re my life. Everything I do is for you. Without you none of it would mean anything to me.”
 

“You’re crazy, Michael. What do you know about the immune system?”
 

“I can learn. Geneus has already come up with a number of relevant genetic modifications. They were the ones who came up with a cure for diabetes by inserting insulin producing genes into the pancreas. I can insist they allow me to work with their immune system team. My artificial chromosomes could easily be adapted for that.”
 

“And what are you going to tell them? That you want to do it because your wife is sick?”

“I won’t tell them anything. I’ll tell them that I think I can make a difference. Which I can.”
 

“And if they ask you
how
you’re going to make a difference?”

“I don’t know. I’ll come up with something,” I said, and Annie gripped onto me tightly again.
 

* * *

The next morning, two men in suits similar to those who first arrested me come into my cell, followed by Don.
 

“Michael Khan,” one of them says, “we are officially placing you under arrest for attempted terrorism. Anything you say or do may be used against you in a court of law. Do you have any questions?”

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

5 years earlier…

I WOKE UP. The house was filled with dawn light.
 

“What time is it?” Annie, lying beside me, said.

“Nearly seven. I have to go. How are you feeling?”
 

“A little better.”
 

The night before Annie had looked terrible. Ever since she’d gotten HIV-4, nearly three years ago now, her energy levels had been decreasing rapidly. It was like she was aging ten years for every year that passed.
 

“Would you like some breakfast? Maybe some eggs and a cup of tea would make you feel better.” I had to get to work but, with Annie’s illness, every second spent with her seemed precious.

“How about a double espresso?”

“How about some camomile tea?” Annie and I had an ongoing disagreement over the industrial quantities of caffeine she consumed.
 

“Oh please, have pity on my dying soul.” She brushed dark hair away from her eyes and sat up against her pillow.
 

I laughed. “Camomile tea it is.”
 

“You should get to work. It’s a big day for you.”

“What about you?” I leant in to kiss her gently.
 

“I’ll be fine. I’m going in to work too. I’ve got a lot I need to get done.” After she’d been diagnosed, Annie had left her full time job at one of the city’s largest hospitals and now volunteered four days a week at a clinic in the de-reg zone.
 

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I can’t lie around here all day. People need me.”

“I need you.”

An hour later, I walked towards the somatic therapy lab at Geneus. The corridor felt designed for more people and being alone in it, hearing my footsteps echo along the linoleum floor, made me uneasy.
 

Inside the lab, I swapped my suit jacket for a lab coat. I had been spending more time in my office and in meetings than actually working recently, and it was a relief to be away from the world of internal company politics and finances and to focus on my research again. I often felt like the immune system itself – protecting my project against foreign invaders.
 

The team – Justin, Richard, Yolanda and about thirty others – were lined up along benches absorbed in their work: prepping samples, loading the machines, and assessing the data on their coms.

“I think we’re almost there,” Justin said.
 

For the last two and half years, we had been working on a somatic therapy immune-system modification. Somatic therapy involved modifying the DNA of people who were already born. It would enable us to help people who were already sick, like Annie, and Justin’s sister, who also had HIV-4.
 

“What have you got?” I said.

“Have a look at this.” He brought up a video on my visual overlay. “This is a sample from one of our somatically modified primates.”
 

I watched a video taken through a fluorescence microscope. Someone added live HIV-4 to one side of a multi-wall plate which contained two blood samples – one from the modified primate and the other from an unmodified one. On the modified side I watched as virally-infected T-cells died – lighting up bright red as they did so.
 

“Isn’t that the recording from the germline modifications we did?” I said.
 

Aside from the somatic modifications, we were also experimenting with germline modifications – modifying fertilized eggs. We’d managed, in some cases, to improve the immune systems of new-born macaques. So far, though, we hadn’t been able to do it consistently.
 

“No,” Justin said. “That was taken this morning. In one of our somatically modified specimens.”

Somatic modification, because we were working with a structure that was already built – in this case a monkey’s body – was a lot harder than germline modification where we could build everything from scratch.
 

“What’s the success rate?”
 

“Twenty percent,” he said. “Seventeen percent have shown negative reactions and the rest have shown no signs of it affecting them at all.”

Justin and I had, over the last few years, come up with a process to insert new strands of DNA into existing cells using a viral vector. It enabled much more precise targeting than any previous technology. We were getting close to perfecting it, but we still weren’t quite there.
 

We talked on for a while, and he reported all the results to me.
 

Justin was a gun I had hired straight out of university. He could have gotten a job anywhere, but he stuck it out at Geneus on a lower salary than he deserved with the hope of finding a cure for his sister. I had never told him about Annie, just as I hadn’t told anyone at Geneus, but on many occasions I’d wanted to. Justin’s suffering was obvious and having someone to share it with probably would have made it easier.
 

After finishing up with Justin, I headed towards the primate lab where I was due to conduct an experiment based on some unexpected side effects of our immune system research: one that made our macaques far more cooperative. These particular monkeys were unlike any that had ever lived before. We’d inserted bonobo genes by germline transformation as part of our immune system work, and they had become matriarchal, polygamous and non-aggressive, just like bonobos.
 

Today we were going to perform a test to check the extent of their behavioral changes. Our macaques were going to be introduced to seven unmodified macaques. Macaques in their natural state defended their territory aggressively, whereas bonobos were more inclined to share, even with strangers.
 

The young macaques were restless and squawked in their cages when I walked into the lab, but the older ones paid me little attention, sitting patiently grooming themselves.
 

Masanori, my colleague, was measuring cups of oats from a stainless steel drum.
 

“Big day,” Masanori said.
 

“Everything ready?”

“Toby’s limping. I think someone must have bitten him in the play cage yesterday.”

“He probably deserved it.” Toby was a cheeky little monkey who pulled the other monkeys’ fur and stole their food.
 

“What time are the others due in?” Masanori said.
 

“Eleven.”

I walked over to the cages, smelling the stench of urine and feces, watching the little brown and white creatures through the wire. I watched Toby make frantic loops of his cage and screech. Toby’s body was almost cat-like, although he stood on hind legs. Masanori was right: he was limping.
 

Sika, the oldest female of the group, stared at Toby out of eyes the color of muddied water as if trying to silence him with her thoughts. Although macaques weren’t matriarchal, bonobos were, and Sika was turning out to be the matriarch of this group. Milo, the alpha male, had been demoted.

The relationship between the two head monkeys had been clearly seen the day before. Masanori and I had put fruit on a tray outside the play pen, too far for the macaques to reach. We had threaded a rope through a ring in the tray and put one end into either side of the pen in such a way that they needed to pull both ends at the same time to get the fruit, something one monkey couldn’t do alone. Milo and Sika had worked this trick out and between them had brought the tray within reach of the cage. It was Sika, though, who pulled the fruit inside the cage and divided it up while the others squawked and rubbed themselves against one another in excitement.
 

“Big day today, Sika. Let’s see how they behave,” I said to her. She nodded at me and grunted in a way which suggested she understood.
 

The monkeys were able to understand not only our tones of voice, body language and a lot of basic words, but they seemed to have a sixth sense as well. Quite often, minutes before Masanori or I arrived in the lab, they would start looking around as if expecting an arrival. They were right so often that we’d come to predict the arrival of the other by their behavior.
 

The monkeys started shaking their cages as Masanori took a bucket of food into the play pen. I followed him in with the remaining fruit and helped spread it out on the concrete floor.
 

Masanori went over to Toby’s cage and tried to pull him out, but he clung on tightly to the wire and screamed.
 

“Okay, calm down, calm down,” Masanori said. He picked up an extra-large serving of grapes from the bench and handed it to Toby. Stuffing the juicy red globules into his mouth, Toby grunted with pleasure, juice running down his chin as Masanori carried him across to the bench.
 

I broke off a few grapes for myself and ate them, then pushed a button which released all the other macaques into the play pen. They greeted each other excitedly, rubbing themselves against one another and grooming each other playfully – just as bonobos would – before feeding.
 

Masanori took Toby over to the operating table and we looked at his leg. A small amount of hair was torn away, exposing a bite mark.
 

“He obviously got on somebody’s nerves,” I said.