Perfectible Animals: A Post Apocalyptic Technothriller (EidoGenesis Book 1) (6 page)

“Gilly probably. Gilly hates him for some reason. I don’t think the behavioral changes in him are as strong as in some of the others.”
 

We applied some antiseptic and a small bandage to Toby’s wound, then released him into the cage with the others.

At 11am, I received a message on my com saying the truck carrying the seven new macaques had arrived. Masanori and I walked down to the loading bay and watched as two security guards opened up the roller door and unloaded the covered cages into the holding area. Once they’d been scanned and cleared, we stacked them onto trolleys and rolled them down the long, pale-green, disinfected corridors to the lab.
 

The modified macaques looked on with solemn eyes as we took the covers off the cages. The new monkeys started shrieking, shaking their doors. A couple of them had urinated.
 

I switched the 3D recorder on.
 

“Ready?” Masanori said.

I nodded.
 

We released the newcomers from their cages into the six-by-eight-metre pen. They ran inside, screaming like a raiding war party, immediately intimidating and chasing off some of our youngsters, like Toby who had come in for a closer look. The oldest members of the modified group, including Sika and Milo, fanned out and closed in cautiously on the intruders.

Milo started shrieking, nodding his brown head aggressively, and exposing his short fangs. Gilly and Sam followed his lead, adding to the racket. Sika tried to hush them with a low grunting, and Lady and Ginger joined in with her. The groups were caught in a standoff. The fur on the backs of their tiny necks stood proud and their bodies tensed. Sika tried a “girney” call, a gentle tranquilizer like a cat’s purr that the macaques often used on their young. I recognized it as bonobo behavior translated into macaque language.
 

The screaming from both sides continued until Milo and the other modified macaques slowly relaxed as Sika purred to them. Seeing that they were no longer challenged, transfixed by Sika as she continued her call, the newcomers also started to quieten.
 

It was Lady, one of our younger females, who went forward next. She sniffed the air in front of her and scratched herself lazily as if to prove to the newcomers that there was nothing to worry about.
 

“You go, Lady!” Masanori whispered under his breath.
 

As Lady got closer, the larger monkeys from the new group started growling again, raising themselves up on their hind legs.
 

“We’d better get ready with the first-aid kit,” I said.
 

Despite the aggressive display of the newcomers, Sika, Lady and Milo advanced, just as bonobos would do. As the advance continued, the newcomers’ growls turned to low moans, and one of the males stepped up and sniffed Sika tentatively. Sika cooed to him and put a hand on him to groom him. The male let out a short, high-pitched scream and then slapped her before retreating. Sika held up a hand to where she’d been hit but there was no blood so I suspected the male had done it more out of surprise than a desire to hurt her.
 

Milo scuttled towards the one who’d hit Sika, but Sika cooed to him then turned her lips out at him and made a comical little nodding motion together with a small clucking sound. I saw the tension in Milo’s body relax. One of the female newcomers, with pretty white patches around her eyes, approached Milo. He let out a low gabble and suddenly it was love at first sight and they started caressing one another tenderly.
 

Both groups came together then and slowly but surely they started cackling and murmuring and grooming one another.
 

Masanori and I turned to one another with smiles on our faces.
 

I walked into the board room later that afternoon. It seemed everything was coming together. The possibility we might finally be able to cure Annie made me feel as if gravity had suddenly weakened.
 

Klaus Hofferman, CEO of Geneus, sat at the head of the table surrounded by the other board members. He was working, his fingers moving in the air in front of him as he manipulated objects on his visual overlay. His thin gray hair was brushed back – exposing his widow’s peak – and his eyes were turned down at the edges. His face was rigid except for his jaw grinding from side to side in reaction to whatever was in front of him on his overlay.
 

The rest of the group was also working. Usually I would join them until Klaus was ready, but today I poured myself some black coffee from the pot on the table and waited for the meeting to start.
 

I looked around at the board members. Beside Masanori was Rachel, the marketing director, thick brown hair over a face too slender to be the result of natural selection and more likely to be the result of cosmetic surgery. At only a couple of thousand dollars a pop, if you weren’t operated-on these days you could pretty much say goodbye to your chances of ever finding a job outside tele-marketing. Next to Rachel was Zhao, the chief financial officer. Half Chinese and half Russian, he cut a striking figure in his blue pin-striped suit. Zhao worked magic on the Geneus books and it was rumored he had numerous copies of our financial files at any given time: one for investors, one for banks, and one for the government. All completely legitimate of course – it was a matter of perspective. Either way, he’d kept the company afloat through some rough weather. With economies around the world falling like dominoes, any company which managed to keep operating was doing okay for itself, especially one like ours which ate hundreds of millions in R&D.
 

Around from Zhao was Klaus, and on the other side of him was Anthony Simons. Anthony was chief operations manager for a number of divisions of the company and for the past year had been progressively more and more against our immune-system project. It not only threatened the other projects, he claimed, but threatened the financial viability of the entire company. Anthony and I had gotten on quite well until Klaus chose to cut Anthony’s pet project – improving athletic skills – so he could redirect the funds from it towards our immune system work. These days we hardly spoke to one another. Next to Anthony was John, balding head of the legal department, and besides him sat Sue-Ling Song, Janet Greeves, and James Charlston, all major shareholders.
 

“Let’s get started,” Klaus said, letting his hands drop loudly on the table like a judge’s gavel. Despite being almost eighty, Klaus looked twenty years younger, and his clear brown eyes stared around the room confidently. “I have some very bad news. Yesterday I received a call from Bill Hamilton, our man over at CryptoLabs, and they’re no longer able to provide us with the investment funding they’d promised. They’re going bankrupt, apparently, like everyone else in this God-forsaken world. Now, this immune-system project is taking far longer than we expected, and we’ve yet to see significant returns from it. At the current rate, without further investment, we’re not going to last until the end of the year. We need to make a decision, and we need to make it fast.”
 

We all stared at one another, wondering who would speak first. My heart felt like it would swell so much it would block my wind passage and I loosened the tie I’d put on for the meeting and undid the top button of my shirt.
 

Anthony, always eager to prove himself, took the lead. He stretched his arms forward so his muscular wrists extended out of his well-tailored sleeves. “As I’ve said before, I think it’s time to cut our losses. This project has sapped the company dry for years and it’s only going to get worse. Our custom facial-features line is turning a profit, and we could amp that up quickly if we stopped putting all our money into this immune system work.”
 

“We can’t just throw it all away now,” John said. “We’ve spent hundreds of millions on it.”
 

“We might have to,” Janet argued.

“Can I report on this week’s findings?” I said.
 

“Please do,” Klaus said, extending a hand impatiently in my direction.
 

I cleared my throat. “Over the last few days we’ve been running tests on the latest batch of macaques. In nearly twenty percent of cases, we have managed to greatly improve their resistance to a large range of viruses, including HIV-4, AIDS, influenza and hepatitis. I’ve got videos here if you’d like to see them…”

“No thanks, Michael. Just give us the low down,” Klaus said.
 

“Well, that’s a forty percent improvement on last time. Forty percent, in just the last two months. I’d say another six to twelve months at the most and we’ll have a viable product.” With our funding on the rocks, I was desperate to convince them to keep going.
 

“That sounds like great news,” Anthony said. “Only we’ve been hearing the same thing for the last eighteen months. “
This is it, this is the one. The breakthrough we’ve been waiting for
.” And, no offense, but so far it hasn’t been.”
 

“You’re right, and believe me, I’m just as frustrated by this situation as anyone. I honestly believe this will be the last stage, though.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Without getting too technical, in this batch we finally managed to perfect the recognition of the histone modifications at each site, and it seems to have made all the difference.” Trying to explain genetics to Anthony was like trying to explain relativity to a macaque.
 

“Is that all you’ve got to report?” Klaus said. “You mentioned something the other day about a new side effect?”
 

“Yes, there is one other thing.”

I told them about the cooperation trials and how our modifications to the genome had inadvertently created more cooperative, less xenophobic monkeys.
 

“Nobody in their right mind is going to accept that kind of response,” John said.
 

“Do you mean to say,” Masanori said, in his quiet but firm voice, “that you wouldn’t like your children to be more cooperative and friendly towards strangers?”
 

John’s children, who had attended many company picnics and family days, were known for terrorizing the other children. Masanori suspected it was caused by a competition modification gone haywire, but I thought it was just bad parenting.
 

“I don’t think anyone would,” Anthony said, racing to John’s aid. “What people want are kids who are going to compete, not kids who are going to be more cooperative.”

“Cooperation has been proven to be one of the major factors in promoting not just evolutionary success but the success in daily life that leads to that,” I said. “Of course people are going to accept it.”
 

Everyone stopped for a minute to think about this.

A couple of people twisted their mouths and nodded but others just sat there. Anthony in particular was shaking his head and looking at the ceiling as if he thought I had gone completely crazy.
 

“Rachel, what will the market say?” Klaus said. “Do you think we could sell cooperation?”

Rachel had a confused look on her face and shook her head. “I really don’t know. I don’t think anyone’s ever tried it before.”
 

“Well, get onto it, then.”

“There is one other small detail,” I said.

“What’s that?” Klaus leaned towards me.

“It seems these new modifications, because they’re based on bonobo genes, also make the test subjects quite a bit friskier.”

“Well, that sounds like something we probably could sell!”
 

The meeting went on for another few hours, and in the end Klaus asked for a survey to be done on the acceptability of increased cooperation and sex-drive.
 

“You’d better bloody well make something of this, Michael,” he said to me as we exited the board room, putting a firm hand on my shoulder. “I’ve put not only my own ass but the ass of the entire company on the line for you here, and we need to see some results. Soon.”

C
HAPTER
S
IX

THAT EVENING, ANNIE called and asked me to meet her at her doctor’s clinic. She said she was feeling better but wanted to get some tests run just in case.
 

I could have taken one of the cable cars that hung throughout the city, crossing flooded streets where traditional vehicles were unable to pass, but I decided to walk, taking the higher streets and the bridges that had been put up after the flood.
 

Very few people knew about Annie’s disease, and we wanted to keep it that way. If someone at Geneus found out about it they would assume my zeal for the immune system project was based on more than just my conviction that I could come up with a solution. With the project already tenuous, something like this would be enough to send it plunging into the ravine of scientific obscurity and me along with it. Which company would want to hire a scientist who had cost their previous employer hundreds of millions in research funds just to try to save his wife?
 

I turned onto a street that had become an informal market.
 

“Kebabs, kebabs kebabs… Baby chickens, ten dollars each, baby chickens… A necklace sir, perfect for the lady, only twenty dollars…” The calls from the vendors were a reminder of the beginning again, of our roots, of the importance of trade to human civilization. It felt more real than the sleek shopfronts that had once glazed this particular street with their promise of perfection in luxury cars, designer clothes and diamond necklaces. A few bars and restaurants still remained, as did the banks, now heavily guarded, but there wasn’t much of the old economy left. These days, almost everything was virtual.
 

Annie’s doctor’s office was in a heritage building without an elevator. I climbed up the wooden stairs. The inside of each step was worn deep from years of passing feet and the boards creaked and wobbled from lack of maintenance. Light trickled through dusty opaque windows on the landings. On the third floor I walked over to a glass door with a small name tag next to it: Dr Graham Baxter.